# Social Skills and Competencies: What They Are and How to Build Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/people-skills/social-skills-and-competencies/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/people-skills/social-skills-and-competencies.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 Social skills and competencies explained: the five areas they cover, how a skill differs from a competence, why employers care, and how to build yours. ## Key facts - Title: Social Skills and Competencies: What They Are and How to Build Them - Category: People Skills - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: social skills and competencies - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/people-skills/social-skills-and-competencies/ ## What this page covers - Social skills and competencies explained: the five areas they cover, how a skill differs from a competence, why employers care, and how to build yours. - Practical guidance for social skills and competencies - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Social skills and competencies are the abilities that let you work positively and productively with other people: getting your ideas across, lining up your goals with other people's, settling disagreements, building trust and, in time, leading. A social skill is one specific behavior you can practice. A competence is using those behaviors well in a real situation. The phrase turns up in job ads, competency frameworks and performance reviews as if everyone already knew what it meant. If you have wondered whether yours are good enough, or whether you come across as too quiet or too blunt, the vague wording makes the question harder than it needs to be. Once you split the label into parts you can see, it becomes much easier to work with. ## What social skills and competencies actually cover The clearest working definition comes from the European skills classification, ESCO. As the Cedefop glossary summarizes it, social and communication skills and competences are the ability to interact positively and productively with others. In practice, that means passing on ideas effectively and with empathy, coordinating your own objectives and actions with other people's, looking for ways to resolve differences, building trust and [settling conflicts](/knowledge/teamwork/resolving-conflict/), looking after the well-being and progress of others, and managing activities and [offering leadership](/knowledge/influence/leading-without-authority/). Two things about that definition are worth holding on to. First, every item on it is something you do, not something you are. You could check each one against last week's work. Second, ESCO places these abilities among its transversal skills, the kind that are not tied to one occupation. What you build in a part-time job or a first role keeps its value in every job after it. There is no single standard definition of social competence. Klaus Schneider noted in 2008 that the concept lacked both a fixed definition and a clear boundary with related ideas about qualifications. That is why employers use the phrase loosely, and why the useful move is not to hunt for the official meaning. Instead, translate the phrase into concrete behaviors you can practice and point to. ## Social skills vs. social competencies: why the difference matters The two words in the phrase do different jobs. A social skill is a specific behavior you can practice on its own, such as listening to the end of a colleague's point before you respond. A social competence is the broader ability to choose and combine those behaviors in a real situation. EBSCO's overview of social competence describes it as navigating social interactions and public situations effectively, which includes adapting how you communicate and [taking the other person's perspective](/knowledge/people-skills/interpersonal-understanding/). Take a tense project meeting. [Listening without interrupting](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/how-to-be-a-good-listener/) is the skill. Recognizing that this meeting needs you to listen rather than argue your case, and then actually doing it while you disagree, is the competence. The distinction matters because job ads and competency frameworks use "competencies" to mean applied behavior at work. Knowing what good social behavior looks like is not enough. That also tells you how to improve: you build the skill through deliberate practice, but the competence only develops in real situations, with real people and real stakes. ## The five areas of social skills and competencies ESCO sorts social and communication skills and competences into five clusters. Seeing them side by side shows something the single label hides. This is not one ability but several, and it is entirely normal to be strong in one area and still have a gap in another. ### Communicating This is about getting ideas across effectively and with empathy, one interaction at a time. It covers how a message is sent and how it is received: whether the person you briefed understood what you needed, and whether they felt heard. In a first job, it shows up in small moments, like how you ask a question, explain a delay or answer a request you don't fully understand. ### Supporting others This area is directed at other people's well-being and progress rather than at a shared task. At work, it can look like noticing that a new colleague is lost and showing them where things are, or taking the time to explain a process you have already figured out. It is the least visible cluster, and the easiest one to overlook when you are busy proving yourself. ### Collaborating in teams and networks This area covers joint work toward a shared goal: coordinating your objectives with other people's, building trust and settling conflicts. It reaches beyond your immediate team to the wider network of people your work depends on. The difference from communicating is scope. A single conversation can go well while the collaboration around it falls apart. ### Leading others This area is about managing activities and offering leadership, which means moving other people's actions and decisions, not only coordinating with them. It does not require a title. Volunteering to organize a group project's schedule, or proposing how a stuck discussion could move forward, already belongs here. ### Respecting an ethical code of conduct The fifth area concerns the standards behind behavior rather than any particular technique: treating people fairly, keeping confidences and speaking about colleagues the way you would if they were in the room. It is the cluster that makes the other four trustworthy, because skill at persuading or coordinating counts for little if people doubt your intentions. An uneven profile across these five is the normal starting point, not a problem. Before you write "strong social skills" on an application, it helps to [check which ones you can back up](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). That way you can point to real examples where you are strong and start practicing where you are not. ## Why social skills and competencies matter at work Most work has to pass through other people before it counts, and the evidence suggests that how you handle those people affects outcomes you might think depend only on effort. A University of Missouri thesis on social skill in the workplace defines it as learnable social behavior used to reach social goals. It found that social skill predicts how many mentors a person has, how much mentoring and social support they receive, how often they go beyond their formal role to help colleagues and the organization, and how well they perform in the job itself. The mechanism is relational. People who handle interactions well attract more help, more guidance and more goodwill, and that support feeds back into the quality of their work. So social skills are not a pleasant extra next to the real work. They are part of what decides how the real work goes. Many people only see this once they are inside an organization. > In our studies, we read a great deal about leadership, organizations, employees, and HR, and all of that is useful. But it doesn't always feel entirely representative of what actually happens in the real world. > > Textbooks often describe organizations in terms of systems, structures, and fairly clear-cut frameworks. But once I entered working life, I realized that much of organizational life is actually shaped by human relationships and human behavior. > > The systems and structures are there to hold things together, but it is people who make the organization work in practice. In that sense, the human side of working life carries far more weight than I had expected. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, and he is careful to call his studies useful. His point is that the human side of work doesn't announce itself in a syllabus. You notice it once you are in the middle of it, which is why it pays to treat these competencies as something to build on purpose. ## Are social competencies a personality trait? No, although they are often discussed as if they were. Research on social competence at work takes three distinct views. Kazemi's 2025 article in *Arbetsmarknad & Arbetsliv* separates them. A descriptive view looks at what employers ask for in job ads. A psychological view treats social competence as personal traits that can be measured with tests. A sociological view sees it as something relational that arises between people. The relational view is the most useful one if you worry that you come across badly. Whether someone is seen as socially competent depends partly on the setting and the people involved. The same person can seem reserved in one team and perfectly at ease in another. A rough start in one workplace is information about that situation. It is not a verdict on who you are. The workplace research points the same way. It defines social skill as learnable behavior, not a fixed endowment. You don't need to become more outgoing or turn into a different person. You need to add specific behaviors and practice them until using them in the right moment becomes routine. In practice, that means picking one behavior at a time, using it deliberately in ordinary situations rather than waiting for a big one, and paying attention to how it lands with the people around you. ## The skills that make these competencies show up in daily work Look at the behaviors under each of the five areas, and the same few underlying abilities keep coming back: what you say and how it reaches people, how you hold up your end of shared work, and how you conduct yourself with everyone around you. **Communication** is the ability behind most of what employers mean when they ask for social competencies, because it is the part other people actually experience. It starts with a genuine desire to understand the person in front of you, then adapting to how they take in information, and being clear and direct about what you need. It also covers the moments that test competence rather than skill: expressing disagreement, handling someone who is angry, apologizing when you got something wrong. None of this depends on being naturally talkative. Listening first is part of the skill, not a weakness to overcome. **Teamwork** is where the collaborating cluster turns into daily habits. Trust comes from being sincere and reliable, which means meaning what you say and doing what you committed to. When a disagreement comes, the skill is to engage it rather than avoid it, keep it on the work instead of the person, and then commit to what the team decides even if you argued for something else. It has little to do with being easy to like. It is about being someone others can count on. **Professional Behaviors** cover the conduct colleagues notice before they judge anything else you do. Showing respect to everyone equally, showing humility and genuine interest, and expressing appreciation build goodwill quietly. Just as important are the behaviors to avoid: staying passive, attacking people, acting superior, working through rumors, and complaining out of habit. This is where the ethical-conduct cluster becomes something you practice every day rather than a principle you agree with. All three are learnable, and the **Job Skills Test** measures each of them as part of **twelve work skills** in total. Because the result shows where you stand on every one, it gives you [a concrete practice target](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) instead of a vague goal to "work on your people skills," so your effort goes where it will change the most. ## Where this leaves you Parts of this may already sound like you on a good day: the colleague you helped find their footing, or the disagreement you kept on the plan rather than the person. The areas that don't come easily yet are the same kind of thing. They are behaviors you haven't practiced enough, not limits on who you are, and you can add them while staying entirely yourself. They also tend to count for more as your work depends more on other people's cooperation, so the time you put in now keeps paying off. If you have ever replayed a meeting afterward and thought of exactly what you should have said, you have already felt the gap between knowing a skill and using it in the moment. That gap is where practice starts. The next step is to find out which of your skills are already doing their job and which ones deserve your attention first. ## Find out where your social skills stand The only thing left is to see where you are starting from. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of the work skills that shape how you get on with colleagues, managers and interviewers, and how you manage yourself along the way. In about 7 minutes, it maps you across all twelve skills and shows which ones will make the biggest difference for you right now, so you know what to practice and what to point to when you apply. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes 7 minutes, and your results are shown instantly.* ## 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? Social skills and competencies explained: the five areas they cover, how a skill differs from a competence, why employers care, and how to build yours. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Teamwork, Professional Behaviors. ### 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/people-skills.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/people-skills/social-skills-and-competencies/ Preferred summary: "Social skills and competencies explained: the five areas they cover, how a skill differs from a competence, why employers care, and how to build yours." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.