# Skills to Learn in Life: Seven That Carry Into Every Job and Relationship Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/skills-to-learn-in-life/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/skills-to-learn-in-life.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer The skills to learn in life that pay off longest: communication, self-awareness, time management, resilience and more, plus how to choose where to start. ## Key facts - Title: Skills to Learn in Life: Seven That Carry Into Every Job and Relationship - Category: Improve Your Skills - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Time Management, Building Resilience - Primary keyword: skills to learn in life - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/improve-skills/skills-to-learn-in-life/ ## What this page covers - The skills to learn in life that pay off longest: communication, self-awareness, time management, resilience and more, plus how to choose where to start. - Practical guidance for skills to learn in life - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The skills to learn in life that pay off longest are the ones you use with everyone, in every job: communicating clearly, knowing your own strengths, managing your time, coping with stress and setbacks, trusting yourself to act, making sound decisions, and building relationships. Practical basics like cooking or budgeting matter as well, but they solve narrower problems. Here is the odd part: school gives you a timetable, a syllabus and a grade for nearly everything, yet almost none of these skills ever appears on a report card. If the list of things you "should" learn feels endless, that is part of the reason: nobody narrowed it down for you. Two properties narrow it quickly, and they explain why these seven earn their place ahead of the rest. ## Why some skills last a lifetime Every skill you could learn falls into one of two broad kinds. Practical skills, such as cooking, basic repairs and handling money, solve specific tasks that come back again and again. Transferable skills govern how you manage yourself and how you deal with other people, and they apply in every job, team and relationship you will ever have. Both are worth having. But if you want skills that pay off across a whole life and career, the [transferable kind](/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills/) carries further, because it never belongs to just one situation. The World Health Organization's ten core life skills lean the same way. Self-awareness, effective communication, interpersonal relationships, decision-making, and coping with stress and emotions sit at the center of the list, and the WHO frames all ten as generic skills: meant to carry from one part of life into the next rather than to solve a single problem. The second property matters just as much: these skills can be learned. A review published by the Inter-American Development Bank (McGrath and Adler, 2022) screened 30 candidate life skills and kept only the 10 with the strongest evidence that they can be measured, that they make a real difference, and that they are malleable, meaning they grow with practice and instruction rather than being fixed traits. That last word is the one to hold on to. If you have ever told yourself you are "just not a people person" or "not the confident type," the evidence points the other way. These are habits you build, not qualities you either have or lack. ## 7 skills to learn in life, and what makes each one last ### 1. Communication If you could learn only one skill from this list, this is the one with the broadest reach. In a Pew Research Center survey of 3,154 Americans asked which skills matter most for success in life, communication came first, ahead of both reading and math. The reason is reach: you use it in every role, every friendship and every negotiation, while most other skills live in narrower settings. Communication is also wider than it looks. It covers what you say, what you signal without words, and, just as much, how you listen. It is the skill that lets you notice when a conversation is going wrong, whether through a misunderstanding or a tense silence, and repair it before it hardens. That makes better communication less about sounding impressive and more about listening until you actually understand the other person. ### 2. Self-awareness In the WHO's framing, self-awareness means recognizing your own character: your strengths and weaknesses, what you want and what you dislike. It often comes before everything else: it is frequently a prerequisite for communicating well and for getting along with people, and it is how you notice that you are under pressure before the pressure takes over. For you, that makes self-awareness the steering wheel for the rest of this list. Knowing [what you are naturally good at](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-identify-your-strengths/) tells you where you will grow fastest. Asking someone you trust for one specific, forward-looking piece of feedback shows you the blind spots you cannot see on your own. Without it, you can spend a year fixing a problem you never had. ### 3. Time management At school, someone else set the timetable. Once you leave education, that structure disappears, and every priority, commitment and boundary becomes yours to decide. That is why managing your time turns into a life skill right at the start of working life, and why, without it, the other skills on this list rarely get practiced at all. The useful version is not about squeezing more into each day. It is about choosing where your hours go, starting with telling what is important from what is [merely urgent](/knowledge/time-management/time-management-urgent-important/). An urgent task shouts; an important one usually waits quietly until it is too late. Learning to spot the difference is what lets you spend your time on purpose instead of by default. ### 4. Coping with stress and setbacks The WHO describes coping with stress as a sequence rather than a temperament: recognize what causes your stress, recognize how it affects you, then act, by changing your surroundings or habits and by learning how to relax. Seen that way, staying steady is a set of steps you can learn, not a personality you were or were not born with. You will need those steps early. Every other skill here is learned partly through things going wrong: a clumsy conversation, a missed deadline, a piece of criticism that stings. Most of those mistakes are small and ordinary, yet they can feel enormous from the inside. > It's OK to make mistakes. You will make mistakes, and life goes on. I sometimes completely fell apart when I made a mistake. Then, the first time I told others what had happened, they said, 'Oh, I've done that too' — forgotten to attach a file to an email, or whatever it was. Making mistakes is part of being new. She was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, and what changed things for her was not toughening up. It was telling other people. ### 5. Confidence The version of confidence worth learning is what researchers call self-efficacy: the belief that you can succeed at a specific task. It is one of the 10 life skills the Inter-American Development Bank review kept from its 30 candidates, which means it passed the test of being something you can develop. That changes how you go after it. You do not wait to feel confident and then act. You act in small steps, such as the question you ask in a seminar or the phone call you make instead of sending another email, and the belief grows from the evidence you collect. Feeling uncomfortable along the way is part of the process, not a sign that you are doing it wrong. ### 6. Decision-making The WHO counts decision-making among its core life skills and frames it as dealing constructively with the choices in your life by weighing the information you have before you choose. Good decisions, in other words, come from a process rather than from instinct alone. A few habits make that process stick: getting a second opinion from someone who might disagree with you, slowing down when you are rushed or upset, and accepting a good-enough answer instead of waiting for a perfect one. They work as well for a judgment call at work as for a choice about where to live or what to study next. ### 7. Building relationships Interpersonal relationships are on the WHO's list of core life skills, and the case for them is practical: nearly everything you will want to do, from finding work to getting advice to getting something done in a team, runs through other people. The habits that build relationships are small and unglamorous. Do what you said you would do. Stay in touch with people before you need anything from them. Offer help, whether that is an introduction, a piece of information or simply a listening ear, without keeping score. That is how acquaintances become the people you can still call on years later. ## Where to start when the list feels endless Seven skills is still a lot to take on at once, so don't. Start with self-awareness, because it decides the order of everything else: knowing which skills are already strong and which are thin tells you where an hour of effort goes furthest. Then choose one skill and one behavior within it, such as listening without planning your reply, setting a fixed end to your working day, or writing down what you will do differently after a setback, and [practice it deliberately](/knowledge/improve-skills/develop-new-skills/) for a few weeks before you add the next. Guessing is a shaky way to set that order, since the habits you rely on without thinking are exactly the ones you notice least. Spending a few minutes to [see which skills need work](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) with the free Job Skills Test can save you months of practicing the wrong one. ## What keeps the rest of the list moving Look back over the seven and three of them do double duty. They are worth learning in their own right, but they also decide whether the other four get learned at all: you learn through conversations, you learn in the time you protect for it, and you keep learning only if setbacks do not stop you. **Communication** is the habit that compounds. Every other skill on this list is practiced with or in front of other people, so getting better at stating your main point first, keeping it clear and brief, and voicing a disagreement calmly instead of swallowing it improves everything else you try. These are behaviors rather than gifts: you can rehearse them in the next conversation you have, and each one gets easier with repetition. **Time Management** decides whether any of this happens. When you run your own schedule, the skills you mean to build lose out to whatever is loudest that day unless you protect time for them. Saying no clearly when your plate is full, setting the end of your working day in advance, and swapping "I must" for "I choose" when you talk to yourself about your commitments are what keep the effort sustainable for decades rather than for a burst. **Building Resilience** is what keeps learning going when it gets uncomfortable. It gives you specific tools: separating what you can control from what you cannot, catching the automatic thought that follows a bad moment before it becomes your reaction, asking what you would tell a friend in the same spot, and sharing the problem with someone you trust. None of it means hiding what you feel; it means thinking clearly about it. If you want to know which of these three is already pulling its weight, you can [map your existing strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) with the free Job Skills Test. It looks at your habits across **twelve work skills in all**, so you see what to build on as well as what to practice, and every gap it shows is one you can learn to close. ## Growing into these skills An ordinary week of yours probably already holds a few of these skills. If you are the one in a group project who notices when a teammate has gone quiet, or you have turned down an extra weekend shift because you knew you needed the rest, you have already practiced pieces of what this list describes. None of these skills is fixed, and learning them does not ask you to become someone else. It asks you to change a few habits, one at a time, in the order that suits you. The stakes on them rise with every new responsibility, whether that is a first job, a team that relies on you or a household of your own, which is why the years around the start of working life are a good time to build them. The useful next move is simply finding out where your own habits sit today. ## See where your own skills stand All that is left is to look at your own profile. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes, it shows where you stand across all twelve skills and which ones would make the biggest difference to what you choose to learn 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? The skills to learn in life that pay off longest: communication, self-awareness, time management, resilience and more, plus how to choose where to start. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Time Management, Building Resilience. ### 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/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/time-management.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/resilience.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-learn-in-life/ Preferred summary: "The skills to learn in life that pay off longest: communication, self-awareness, time management, resilience and more, plus how to choose where to start." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.