# Skills to Improve: Which Ones Matter for You, and How to Get Better Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/skills-to-improve/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/skills-to-improve.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 Which skills to improve first, how to spot your own gaps, how to practice them at work, and what to say when an interviewer asks what you'd improve. ## Key facts - Title: Skills to Improve: Which Ones Matter for You, and How to Get Better - Category: Improve Your Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Building Confidence, Communication - Primary keyword: skills to improve - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/skills-to-improve/ ## What this page covers - Which skills to improve first, how to spot your own gaps, how to practice them at work, and what to say when an interviewer asks what you'd improve. - Practical guidance for skills to improve - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation The skills to improve first are the ones you use every day and handle least well. Early in a working life that is usually communication, time management, working with your manager or teamwork. Feedback tells you which of them is yours, and the improvement comes from deliberate practice in real situations, not from reading. It is unsettling to suspect that something is holding you back when nobody has told you what it is. That suspicion is worth taking seriously, and it is also something you can act on: these are learned behaviors, not fixed parts of your personality, so any gap you find is one you can close. The real question is which gap to start with, and the answer depends less on a list than on two things about you. ## What skills should I improve? Start with the skills that every working day tests: the nontechnical ones that decide how you work with other people and how you manage yourself. They are rarely taught in school, you use them in almost every hour at work, and they carry over from one job and industry to the next, so a gain in one keeps paying off in every role after it. They fall into three rough groups. Some are about managing yourself: knowing your strengths and blind spots, setting your own direction, building confidence and bouncing back from setbacks. Most are the basics of working with others: professional behavior, communication, teamwork, working with your manager, time management and decision-making. Two are about moving ahead once the basics are in place: networking and building influence. You don't need to improve all of them at once, and you shouldn't try. The skills to improve first are the ones where two things overlap: you handle them poorly, and your work calls on them often. ## How do I know which skills I need to improve? Ask other people, because the gaps that cost you most are usually the ones you can't see yourself. You know how you meant an email to come across; the person reading it knows how it actually landed. Feedback from a manager or a colleague who sees your work closes that distance. How you ask decides what you get back. "How am I doing?" tends to earn a polite "Fine." A narrow, forward-looking question earns something usable: what is one thing I could do differently in team meetings, or what would have made that report easier to use? Ask two or three people and listen for what repeats. Your manager is the most useful person to ask, for a plain reason: they see your work, they know what your role will demand next, and they are the one who judges your results. A conversation about how you could do the job better, ending with two or three skills you agree to work on, gives your priorities a weight that self-chosen ones don't have. It shouldn't be a once-a-year event, either. Regular feedback keeps those priorities current as the job changes around you. If you have ever finished a week unsure whether your work was what your manager actually wanted, that uncertainty is common. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described the conversation he wished he had had: > I think it would help me a lot to sit down with my direct manager and really understand what I need to do to be successful in their eyes. > > That would make it much easier to go to work without constantly second-guessing myself. In the end, my manager is the person assessing whether I am doing a good job, so I need to understand their expectations and work within them. > > That may also mean doing something I'm not always very good at: simply taking their direction, doing the work well, and finding satisfaction in that — even when I don't necessarily agree with everything or find it slightly frustrating that they get to decide. > > The important thing is to keep that dialogue open and be honest. Ask direct questions instead of circling around the issue, because trying to guess what people really mean simply takes too much time. He is asking for more than reassurance. Knowing [what success looks like](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/how-to-align-expectations-with-your-manager/) to the person who judges your work is the most direct way to learn which skills matter most in your role. ## Should I work on my weaknesses or my strengths? Both, but not every weakness deserves equal effort. A gap in a skill your role uses daily costs far more than a gap in one it rarely touches. If you deal with clients all day, weak communication shows up in every conversation; weak networking, in the same job, may barely register this year. So rank your gaps by how often your work exposes them, and start at the top. Strengths deserve deliberate attention too. Work is not school: nobody grades you on an even spread across every subject, and much of your best progress will come from roles and tasks that use what you are already good at. The practical balance is to fix the gaps that keep getting in your way and keep building on the strengths that set you apart. Once you can see [how your skills rank against each other](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), it becomes much easier to tell a gap that costs you every day from one that can wait. ## What are some skills to improve at work? The useful version of this answer is not a skill name but a behavior you can practice this week. A few examples from the skills most often worth improving early on (communication gets its own answer below): - Time management: before you start a new task, confirm who is asking, what exactly they want, when it is due (a date, not "ASAP") and what finished looks like. - Working with your manager: book a short one-on-one every week or two, and arrive with a written list of what you want to discuss. - Teamwork: when you commit to something in a meeting, deliver it by the time you said, or say early that you can't. - Professional behavior: talk about colleagues who aren't in the room as if they were. - Decision-making: before a call you feel rushed into, ask one experienced colleague for a [second opinion](/knowledge/decision-making/getting-a-second-opinion/). Each of these is small enough to try tomorrow and specific enough that you'll know whether you did it. ## How can I improve my skills at work? By practicing them where they are needed, in steps small enough to measure. Skills improve by being performed, not studied. A course or a book can give you structure and vocabulary, but the ability itself only builds when you take part in situations that require it. Three habits make that practice work: 1. **Turn the skill into a specific, measurable goal.** "Improve my presenting" gives you nothing to act on. "Present our team's update at three meetings before the end of the quarter" gives you a target you can practice toward and check, and seeing the progress is what keeps you going. 2. **Go looking for repetitions.** Volunteer to present the update, take the minutes, run a short meeting, write the summary email nobody else wants to write. Chances to practice rarely arrive on their own; you usually have to ask for them. 3. **Decide in advance where, when and how.** "At Tuesday's team meeting, first item, I'll give the update in two minutes" is far harder to put off than "sometime soon." Afterward, ask one person who was there what worked and what you could change. None of this requires a different personality. These skills are behaviors, so a gap is simply something you haven't practiced yet. The belief that you are "just not a [people person](/knowledge/improve-skills/how-to-improve-people-skills/)" is the one thing that reliably keeps it that way, because it stops the practice that would close it. ## How do I improve my communication skills? Break the skill into parts, because "communicate better" is too broad to practice. Four parts carry most of the weight at work: listening actively, so you understand before you answer; stating your main point first; keeping spoken and written messages brief and clear; and asking open-ended questions that invite a real answer instead of a yes or no. Each part can be practiced in situations you already have. Rewrite one email a day so the first sentence says what you need. In your next one-on-one, let the other person finish completely, then sum up what you heard before you respond. In a meeting, swap one "Is that OK?" for "What would make this work for you?" Pick one part, practice it for two weeks, then add the next. ## How do I answer "what skills would you like to improve" in an interview? Interviewers ask this to learn two things: whether you know yourself, and whether you actively work on your own development. A strong answer has three parts. Name a genuine, learnable skill that is not central to the job; for a sales role, saying you need to work on communication would be a mistake. Show that you already have some competence in it. Then describe what you are doing about it, such as a course you are taking or a project that stretches you. For a graduate applying to an analyst role, that might be presenting to larger groups: you are comfortable explaining your work to one or two people, and you have started volunteering to present in seminars to build it up. Avoid the two non-answers, claiming your [weakness is perfectionism](/knowledge/self-awareness/strengths-and-weaknesses-examples/) or saying there is nothing you need to improve. Both suggest you haven't looked closely. ## Where getting better actually starts Look at what each answer above asked of you: hearing an honest assessment from your manager, practicing in front of colleagues before you feel polished, and saying what you mean in fewer, clearer words. None of those is a study technique. Each one, looked at closely, is a skill of its own. **Building Self-Awareness** decides whether you work on the right thing. Your own sense of your strengths is a start, but blind spots sit exactly where you can't see them, and specific, future-focused feedback is how you find them. Done well, it leaves you with a short list that belongs to you rather than a generic one, and it lets you treat each gap as something you haven't learned yet instead of a verdict on who you are. **Building Confidence**. Picking the right skill changes nothing until you practice it with people watching, and that is where most improvement plans stall. Confidence here is not a pep talk; it is built from evidence. Choose a challenge just beyond what you can already do, accept that it will feel uncomfortable, and repeat it until it feels ordinary before you step up again. Each attempt that goes fine makes the next one easier to begin. **Communication** is the skill most likely to end up on your list, because it runs through almost every hour of the working day and small gains add up fast. It also shows how any broad skill becomes improvable: you don't get better at communication as a whole, you get better at leading with your point, listening before you answer, or saying things more briefly. Those are habits, not charisma, and you can build every one of them. Practice is easier to keep up when you can see it working. The free Job Skills Test lets you [get a starting score](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) on these three and on **nine other work skills**, which gives every round of practice something to be measured against. ## You may already know where to begin Some of this may describe things you already do without calling them practice. If you have ever reread an email before sending it to make sure the request was clear, you were working on communication. If you have noticed that you talk freely in one-on-ones but go quiet once a meeting grows past six people, you have already found a specific target to work on. Whatever your gaps turn out to be, they describe what you haven't practiced yet, not who you are, and you can close them while staying entirely yourself. You also only need to work on two or three at a time. The ones you leave alone tend to show more as your work involves more people and larger decisions, which is a good reason to find them now, while the stakes are modest and every attempt is cheap to make. What remains is knowing which two or three come first. ## Find the skill to improve first You know how to improve a skill; the only open question is which one deserves your effort first. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. In 7 minutes it shows where you stand across all twelve, from communication and time management to working with your manager and confidence, and which of them will make the biggest difference if you start on them now. ## 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? Which skills to improve first, how to spot your own gaps, how to practice them at work, and what to say when an interviewer asks what you'd improve. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Building Confidence, Communication. ### 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/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/skills-to-improve/ Preferred summary: "Which skills to improve first, how to spot your own gaps, how to practice them at work, and what to say when an interviewer asks what you'd improve." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.