# Development Skills Meaning: Building Skills on Purpose Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/development-skills-meaning/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/development-skills-meaning.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving building self-awareness at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Development skills usually means skills development: deliberately building the abilities your work needs. Learn the types and where development really happens. ## Key facts - Title: Development Skills Meaning: Building Skills on Purpose - Category: Improve Your Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Setting Goals, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: development skills meaning - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/development-skills-meaning/ ## What this page covers - Development skills usually means skills development: deliberately building the abilities your work needs. Learn the types and where development really happens. - Practical guidance for development skills meaning - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation "Development skills" usually means skills development: the deliberate, ongoing process of gaining, improving and applying the abilities your work asks of you. It is not a special list of skills. It covers technical skills as well as the interpersonal and self-management skills that shape how you work with others, and most of it happens on the job. If you have met the phrase in a job ad or on an appraisal form, it can sound like something everyone else already understands. The idea itself is simple. The useful part is knowing which skills it points to, and how development actually takes place once you are at work. ## What development skills means in practice The phrase reads more naturally the other way around. "Development" names an activity, and "skills" names what the activity works on. So when a manager talks about your development skills, or a job ad promises skills development, the subject is how you get better at things, not a separate category of skill you are supposed to have already. It also helps to be clear about what a skill is. At its most basic, a skill is the ability to carry out an action and get a reliable result, usually within a reasonable amount of time and effort. That definition puts the weight on doing, not knowing. You can understand exactly how a good meeting summary is structured and still be unable to write one under time pressure. Knowledge becomes a skill only when you can produce the result again and again, which is why development always involves practice and never just reading. One narrower meaning is worth recognizing. In some HR policies and legal texts, "skills development" refers specifically to training an employer provides so that staff perform better in their jobs, including training delivered on the job. When the phrase appears in a contract or an HR policy, it usually describes something the organization offers. When it comes up in a conversation about your career, it describes your own growth, which you have far more control over. ## The kinds of skills development covers Skills development spans two broad kinds of skill, plus one property that cuts across both. Knowing the difference matters because each kind grows in a different way. ### Hard skills Hard skills are concrete, learned abilities: working in a particular piece of software, operating equipment, speaking a second language, running a specific type of analysis. UNESCO-UNEVOC's glossary for technical and vocational education describes them as easily observed and measured, easily trained, and closely connected with knowledge. That is exactly why they dominate job ads and transcripts: they are the easiest skills to verify. They are usually developed through structured training followed by practice, and progress is relatively easy to see. ### Interpersonal and self-management skills The second kind covers how you work with other people and how you manage yourself at work: communicating clearly, working well in a team, building a productive relationship with your manager, managing your time, building the confidence to take on something unfamiliar. These are often called soft skills, and they are harder to pin down. UNESCO-UNEVOC notes that most definitions describe them by what they do rather than what they are, which is one reason they are seldom taught directly. Most people pick them up by trial and error, and some never quite do. [They are learnable](/knowledge/improve-skills/soft-skills-to-learn/), though. Developing them changes how you behave at work, not who you are. ### Transferable skills "Transferable" is a property, not a third kind of skill. Southern New Hampshire University defines transferable skills as abilities learned or developed from past experiences, such as jobs, volunteering, sports or personal challenges, that can be applied in future roles, and notes that they can be either hard or soft. In practice, the question to ask about any skill is whether it would still be worth something if you [changed employer or field](/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills/). Interpersonal and self-management skills almost always pass that test. It also means your part-time job, your volunteer role and your time on a team have already been developing skills, whether or not anyone called it that. ## Where skills development actually happens If skills development makes you think of courses, the best-known model of workplace learning points somewhere else. The 70-20-10 model grew out of research at the Center for Creative Leadership in the 1980s, where Morgan McCall, Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger interviewed executives about the experiences that had developed them most. The resulting rule of thumb holds that about 70 percent of learning comes from experience on the job, 20 percent from other people, and 10 percent from formal training. The numbers are not a measured law, and the original research covered senior executives only. The direction is the point: most skill development happens at work, not in a classroom. The on-the-job share teaches well because of its feedback loop. Real work makes you take decisions, deal with problems and make mistakes, and it shows you the result quickly. You act, see what happened, and adjust. That is what turns ordinary early-career tasks into development, provided you [approach them as practice](/knowledge/improve-skills/develop-new-skills/) rather than just something to get through. Formal education, training, self-study and mentoring all have a place alongside that experience. None of them is complete on its own. A course gives you a defined body of knowledge; work gives you the repetitions; a mentor or experienced colleague tells you what you are not seeing. It is natural to expect the organization to do the developing, especially when the word appears in a job ad. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described how that expectation met everyday reality: > I think that, even though I've obviously developed a great deal during my time in my current organization, I may also have expected them to take a more active role in accelerating my development — almost as if they were going to put me on a fast track and shape me into the future CEO within a few years. > > At some point, I probably had to face the reality that things move more slowly in the real world. That was also somewhat different from what I felt I had been led to expect when I first joined. > > The truth is that there are always plenty of routine, less glamorous tasks that simply need to get done, no matter what position you are in. I think part of me had hoped that those kinds of tasks would disappear once I graduated and entered professional life. > > What I've learned since then is that they don't. Even as you move further up the ladder, there will always be work that is necessary rather than exciting. He had developed a great deal, and he says so. What changed was his sense of who drives it. Routine, necessary work is where much of that 70 percent takes place, and it develops you most when you decide in advance what you are trying to get better at while you do it. There is one more catch. Learning from experience and from colleagues is far harder to measure than formal training. A course ends with a certificate; a year of deliberate practice ends with nothing on paper unless you [keep track of it yourself](/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-inventory/). That makes real progress easy to underestimate. A simple fix is to [record a baseline of your skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) now, free, and look again after a few months of focused practice, so the change becomes something you can actually see. ## What makes skills development work for you Look back at what separates deliberate development from simply accumulating experience: knowing what to work on, having a direction for it, and being willing to practice before you are good at something. Each of those depends on a skill of its own. **Building Self-Awareness** is where a vague phrase becomes a personal list. You cannot develop "skills" in general, only particular ones, and choosing them starts with an honest read of your natural strengths and of the blind spots other people notice before you do. Feedback does most of the work here. Asking a colleague or your manager one specific, future-focused question about your last piece of work tells you more about what to develop next than any generic list could. **Setting Goals** gives development a direction without locking you into it. Early in a working life, a horizon of six to eighteen months is long enough to decide which experiences to look for and short enough to let your goals sharpen as you discover what fits your strengths and work values. It also shapes where you develop: a workplace where you learn the right things from the right people decides what your everyday experience will teach you. **Building Confidence** is what lets development happen at all. Skill grows by doing: breaking a new ability into manageable steps, practicing each one a little outside your comfort zone, and treating a mistake as information about what went wrong rather than who is wrong. Confidence in a skill is the evidence of having done it, so it follows practice rather than coming first. If you want to know which of these to put first, the free Job Skills Test [shows where your effort counts most](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). It scores all three alongside the rest of the **twelve work skills** it covers, and every gap it points to is one you can close through practice. ## Making development skills your own Some of this may already be underway without a name attached. If you have ever reworked a presentation after a colleague's comment, or asked to sit in on a meeting just to see how it was run, you were developing a skill on purpose. None of these skills is fixed. They are behaviors you build through practice while staying exactly who you are, and which ones matter most for you right now depends on your role and where you are starting. The interpersonal side in particular tends to carry more weight as your responsibilities widen, which makes the early years, when mistakes are cheap and learning is expected, a good time to practice. What is still missing is a clear starting point. ## Find your starting point That leaves one practical step: seeing where you stand today. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. In about 7 minutes you answer a set of questions and get a profile across all twelve work skills, showing which are already strong and which would make the biggest difference to develop next. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Development skills usually means skills development: deliberately building the abilities your work needs. Learn the types and where development really happens. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Setting Goals, Building Confidence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/development-skills-meaning/ Preferred summary: "Development skills usually means skills development: deliberately building the abilities your work needs. Learn the types and where development really happens." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.