# Skill Development and Employment: How Skills Get You Hired and Keep You Growing Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/skill-development-and-employment/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/skill-development-and-employment.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 Employers hire for interpersonal skills first and build technical skills on the job. See how skill development and employment connect and what to build. ## Key facts - Title: Skill Development and Employment: How Skills Get You Hired and Keep You Growing - Category: Improve Your Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Setting Goals, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: skill development and employment - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/skill-development-and-employment/ ## What this page covers - Employers hire for interpersonal skills first and build technical skills on the job. See how skill development and employment connect and what to build. - Practical guidance for skill development and employment - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation Skill development and employment connect in two stages. To get hired, you need the technical skills your field requires and the interpersonal skills that show you can work with other people. To stay employed and move forward, you keep developing both, mostly on the job. At the hiring stage, employers usually weigh the interpersonal side first. That can feel unsettling if most of your effort so far has gone into the technical side: courses, grades, a degree that took years. The good news is that the skills employers look for first can be learned, and you can start long before your first contract. Why employers weigh skills in this order tells you a lot about where your next hour of effort should go. ## How skill development and employment connect The clearest picture of how employers think comes from how their priorities shift over time. In a Kaplan survey of employers, communication ranked first out of 30 competencies at the point of recruitment, while technical knowledge ranked 24th. Two years after recruitment, technical knowledge had climbed to second place. The logic behind that shift is practical. Employers hire on the assumption that they can teach the technical side of the job once you are inside. What they cannot easily teach in the first weeks is how you work with people: whether you explain yourself clearly, listen, and fit into a team that already has its own way of doing things. So they screen for that first. Once you are established, the technical depth of your work becomes the main thing your performance is judged on. For you, this means the skills that get you hired are not the same skills that dominate later evaluations, and the interpersonal ones are needed first. It also means skill development does not stop at the job offer. Employment is not only getting hired; it is staying employed and progressing. The same skills that help you stand out at recruitment, such as communicating clearly, working well with others, and behaving professionally, are the ones that keep you valued once you are no longer the new hire. Treat skill development as the base for a whole career, not a hurdle you clear once. ## The four kinds of skills employment depends on "Skills" covers several different things, and they are developed and judged in different ways. The OECD's assessment framework for vocational education, PISA-VET, treats employability skills as a component in their own right, alongside occupation-specific skills. That separation says something useful: being good at your subject is one requirement, and being employable is another. The International Labour Organization makes a similar split in its framework for human resources development, Recommendation No. 195, separating vocational or technical skills from core skills that carry across jobs. Sorting skills into four kinds shows where your own development is likely to pay off most. ### Foundational skills Foundational skills are the basics that both work and further learning are built on, such as literacy and numeracy. The OECD's adult skills survey, PIAAC, measures them, along with problem-solving in technology-rich environments, as a base layer of a working population's skills. If you are finishing a degree or vocational program, you almost certainly have these already. They are prerequisites rather than differentiators: necessary, but rarely the thing that sets one graduate apart from another. ### Technical skills Technical, or vocational, skills are the occupation-specific skills and knowledge your qualification certifies: the methods, tools, and subject knowledge of your field. The ILO describes them as basic occupational skills that serve as a base for further on-the-job training, and that phrase is worth taking literally. Your degree or certificate is a starting platform, not a finished toolkit. Employers expect to build on it. That explains a feeling many graduates have in their final year: qualified on paper, yet not quite ready for the job. > I thought: you've been to university, you've learned everything, now you can do anything. I've taken every course — and I can't. When I get a job it'll be a company taking me in because they can use me in the long run, but in the short run they'll have to teach me a lot. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, and her realization is the right one. Her education is what makes her worth hiring and teaching. The gap she noticed is not a flaw in what she learned; it is the space that on-the-job development is meant to fill. ### Core, portable skills Core skills are the ones that move with you. The ILO calls skills "portable" when they can be used productively across different employment contexts, jobs, and enterprises, and it counts social and communication abilities among the core skills. In everyday working life, that means things like communicating clearly, working in a team, behaving professionally, and building a working relationship with your manager. Portability is what makes these skills so valuable for employment: your first job is unlikely to be your last, and these skills come with you when the job, the employer, or even the field changes. This is also where the gap between education and work tends to sit. An employer survey by The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, found that employers saw an under-supply of soft skills among recent graduates as a major challenge. The reason is structural more than personal. Education gives you years of practice in your subject but far fewer chances to practice workplace behaviors, so most graduates arrive strong on knowledge and lighter on the skills employers screen for first. That is exactly why deliberate development here pays off. ### Social and emotional skills The fourth kind is about managing yourself at work: building confidence for unfamiliar tasks, bouncing back when something goes wrong, managing your time, and reading the environment you are in. International assessment measures these separately from occupation-specific competence, drawing on the OECD's Study on Social and Emotional Skills. What distinguishes them is how they work. A 2025 study of employers in small and medium-sized businesses, published in Education + Training, found that soft skills did not affect employability directly but had a strong indirect influence through [organizational fit](/knowledge/setting-goals/company-culture/). In other words, these skills matter because they decide whether you can settle into and function inside a particular team and culture. A 2025 study of Tanzanian employers points the same way: among the qualities they valued in graduates were being self-aware of workplace dynamics and communicating effectively. Reading how a workplace works is something you can only build by being in one, observing, and getting feedback. That reframes these skills from a list of words on a CV to the everyday behaviors that make a workplace want to keep you. ## How to develop skills for employment, before and after you are hired Technical skills are built mostly through study and then practice. The other kinds develop differently: mainly by doing. You practice in real situations, get feedback, and take on [gradually harder challenges](/knowledge/improve-skills/how-to-improve-career-skills/). Reading about them helps you understand them, but it does not build them. That makes work experience, student jobs, internships, volunteer roles, and eventually the first job itself the main training ground. A few habits turn that experience into development rather than just time served: - **Pick one skill at a time.** A busy week rarely improves a skill you are not paying attention to. Decide which skill you are working on, such as speaking up in meetings or keeping a commitment you made to a team, so that you recognize the chance to practice it when it comes. - **[Ask for specific feedback](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/ask-for-feedback-at-work/).** After a piece of work that matters, ask one or two concrete, forward-looking questions about what to do differently next time. Without that outside view, it is easy to repeat the same small mistake for months. - **Choose experiences that stretch you a little.** A task just outside your comfort zone builds more than one you can already do in your sleep, and much more than one so far beyond you that you freeze. - **[Collect evidence as you go](/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-inventory/).** Employers judge these skills through what you did, not what you claim. Note the concrete situations where you handled something well: a disagreement you resolved, a deadline you rescued, a process you explained to someone new. Those are the examples that make your skills credible in an application or interview. - **Keep going after you are hired.** Your first job is the most intensive skill development period of your career. Treat it as a place to learn, not only a place to prove what you already know. The hard part is the first step: knowing which skill to work on when everything feels relevant. Before you choose what to practice, it is worth taking a few minutes to [see which workplace skills need work](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). The free Job Skills Test gives you that starting point, so your next internship or first month on the job builds the skills that will make the most difference. ## What makes skill development pay off at work Look at what separates development that leads to employment from development that just fills time: knowing where your real gaps are, choosing places where you will learn the right things, and turning practice into a growing sense that you can actually do the work. Each of these rests on something you can learn. **Building Self-Awareness** tells you which skills are worth developing first. You cannot work on everything at once, and you do not need to. Knowing your natural strengths shows you where effort will grow fastest, and actively asking for specific, future-focused feedback reveals the blind spots that stand between you and the job you want. Understanding the feedback, adding your own view, and reflecting on it is how a comment from a supervisor becomes a development plan instead of a sting. **Setting Goals** shapes where your development happens. Early in a career, the workplace you choose largely decides what you will learn and from whom. Prioritizing a role where you will learn the right things from the right people, and a manager who invests in your growth, can be worth more than a slightly higher starting salary. Focusing on roles that play to your strengths means more of your energy goes into growth and less into patching weaknesses. **Building Confidence** is what closes the distance between "I studied this" and "I can do this." It is built by doing, not by positive thinking: breaking a big step into smaller ones, practicing at each level before moving up, and accumulating evidence that you can handle what the job asks. Every small task you complete in an internship or first job adds to that evidence, and the evidence is what lets you take on the next, harder thing. The Job Skills Test scores these three as part of a wider set of work skills that show up in nearly every role, and it shows which ones are already working for you. [Find your strongest and weakest skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) in a few minutes. Whatever it points to is a behavior you can practice, not a verdict on who you are. ## Where your own skill development starts You may notice that some of this already describes you. If you have ever explained a group project's sticking point to a supervisor, or handled an impatient customer in a part-time job, you have already practiced the kind of skill employers screen for first. None of these skills is fixed. A gap is simply something you have not learned yet, and closing it changes how you work, not who you are. The skills worth your attention right now depend on where you are starting. They also tend to count for more with each step up in responsibility, which makes the period before and just after your first job the easiest time to build them. What you need is a clear view of your starting point. ## See where your skills stand The only thing left is to turn all of this into a concrete first step. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes, you get a profile of where you stand across all twelve work skills and see which ones will make the biggest difference to getting hired and moving forward. Take it, pick the one skill it points to, and choose one situation in the next two weeks where you will practice it. ## 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? Employers hire for interpersonal skills first and build technical skills on the job. See how skill development and employment connect and what to build. ### 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/skill-development-and-employment/ Preferred summary: "Employers hire for interpersonal skills first and build technical skills on the job. See how skill development and employment connect and what to build." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.