# List of Traits and Skills: 9 Employers Want, and How to Prove Each One Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities/list-of-traits-and-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities/list-of-traits-and-skills.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 A list of traits and skills employers value, from dependability to teamwork and written communication, plus how to pick yours and back each with an example. ## Key facts - Title: List of Traits and Skills: 9 Employers Want, and How to Prove Each One - Category: Personal Qualities - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Professional Behaviors, Teamwork - Primary keyword: list of traits and skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities/list-of-traits-and-skills/ ## What this page covers - A list of traits and skills employers value, from dependability to teamwork and written communication, plus how to pick yours and back each with an example. - Practical guidance for list of traits and skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation A useful list of traits and skills keeps the two apart. Traits describe who you are: dependable, honest, curious, humble, hardworking, quick to take initiative. Skills are what you can do and learn: teamwork, written communication, solving problems. Employers want both, but they believe only what you can back with an example. That last part is where most self-descriptions stall. Picking words is easy. Picking the ones that are true of you, and that you could defend in an interview, is harder, especially when you do not yet have much work history to point to. Below are nine traits and skills worth considering, each with the behavior that makes it believable, followed by a way to choose your own handful and prove it. ## Traits vs. skills: why the difference matters A simple rule from the University of East London's careers material separates the two: a skill is something you do or learn, and a quality is something you are. That difference changes how you claim each one. A skill can be demonstrated directly, with a task you completed or a result you produced. A trait can only be inferred from a pattern in how you behave over time. Traits are the steadier of the two. Psychologists describe them through broad dimensions such as conscientiousness, openness and extraversion, part of the [Big Five model of personality](/knowledge/personal-qualities/list-of-personal-traits/), and they shape what comes easily to you. Skills grow through practice, training and experience, and they decide what you can reliably deliver. An employer can see your skills at work directly; your traits they have to read off what you do. The line between the two is softer than the labels suggest. Kate Walton, a researcher at ACT, argues that social and emotional skills and personality traits are at a minimum highly similar, and that both can be developed. That matters for you: a quality that does not come naturally yet is not a verdict on who you are. The behavior behind it can be practiced, and you stay yourself while you practice it. ## A list of traits employers value, and the behavior behind each Each trait below comes paired with what it looks like in practice, because the behavior is what an employer can actually observe, and what you can actually describe. ### 1. Dependable Dependability means doing what you committed to, when you said you would. It is also a word any applicant can write, so on its own it tells an employer almost nothing. What carries it is a record: the group project where your part arrived on the date you promised, the part-time job where your manager could count on you to cover the shift, the deadline that moved forward and you still met. If you can name a situation where someone else's work depended on yours and you came through, you have your proof. ### 2. Honest Honesty at work is less about never lying and more about saying the true thing when it costs you something: flagging your own mistake early instead of hoping nobody notices, telling a supervisor that a deadline is unrealistic, admitting you did not understand an instruction. Nobody can verify it in a single interview; employers infer it from behavior over time. The strongest evidence you can offer is a moment when being straight with someone was the uncomfortable choice, you made it anyway, and you can say what happened next. ### 3. Curious Curiosity shows up as questions and genuine interest in other people's work: asking why a process runs the way it does, picking up a tool before anyone required it, wanting to understand a teammate's part of a project before judging it. Treat it as something you do rather than something you are, and it becomes both practicable and easy to describe. A good example names what you were curious about and what you did with the answer. ### 4. Humble and coachable Humility is easiest to see in [how you take feedback](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-take-criticism/). A coachable person hears the whole correction without defending themselves, asks what to do differently, and changes something the next time. Like every trait on this list, it is inferred from a pattern of behavior, not from the word on a resume. Your proof is a specific piece of feedback you received, what you changed because of it, and how the next attempt went. ### 5. Shows initiative Initiative is volunteering for work nobody assigned: noticing a gap and filling it, offering to build the slides, setting up the shared document before anyone asks. It converts naturally into a story, because it already has a shape: what you noticed, what you did, what changed. Keep the example modest and true. A small thing you started yourself is more convincing than a big thing you merely took part in. ### 6. Strong work ethic A strong work ethic is one of the qualities employers name outright. In NACE's Job Outlook 2024 survey of employers, it was among the leading attributes they wanted to see on new graduates' resumes, alongside problem-solving, teamwork and written communication. Like any trait, it becomes believable only as specific behavior in a specific situation with a result: a semester where you held a job and kept up your coursework, a task you finished properly when a shortcut was available, a project you saw through after the interesting part was over. ## A list of skills employers screen for Skills are the half of the list you can demonstrate most directly, and employer surveys point to the ones worth proving first. In NACE's Job Outlook 2024, problem-solving and teamwork led the attributes employers wanted to see on new graduates' resumes, with written communication and a strong work ethic close behind. NACE's 2026 spring update again names working in a team, solving problems and communicating well as the high-impact skills students should showcase. The logic is simple: a new graduate has little track record, so employers look for capabilities that predict whether you can work with others and handle tasks without someone watching over your shoulder. ### 7. Teamwork Teamwork is a capability you build, not a personality type, which is good news if you are not naturally outgoing. What employers want to see is that a group worked better because you were in it: you coordinated your part with others, shared what you knew, delivered what you promised and let the group share the credit. Since nearly every application claims to be a team player, describe the team, your role in it, and what the group achieved because of something you did. ### 8. Written communication Written communication is the one skill on this list where your application is itself the evidence. A resume that leads with the main point, a cover letter that is brief and clear, an email to a recruiter that is proofread and answers the question asked: each shows the skill before anyone reads a word about it. Beyond the application, good examples include a report other people relied on, instructions a new colleague could follow without asking you, or a message that cleared up a misunderstanding. ### 9. Problem-solving Problem-solving is the employer's word for sound judgment on the job: working out what went wrong, getting the facts and a second opinion where you need them, choosing a course of action and following it through. It is shown the same way every time, as a situation, the decision you made and the result. A booking system that failed in the middle of a busy shift, or a group project that lost a member two weeks before the deadline, is exactly the kind of material that works, as long as you can say what you decided and why. ## How to choose from a list of traits and skills Nine entries is a menu, not a self-description. Choosing from it is a self-knowledge job before it is a wording job, and it works best in three passes. First, go through a full inventory and mark only the items that are genuinely true of you, not the ones you wish were. Second, look for clusters: several marked items that point at the same [underlying strength](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-identify-your-strengths/). Dependable, hardworking and quick to take initiative, marked together, may say more about you than any one of them alone. Third, check your picks with someone who has seen you work, such as a supervisor, a teacher or a teammate, and ask which of your marked items they would recognize. Where their answer and yours differ, you have learned something worth knowing. If this feels harder than it should, that is because an education gives you grades, not a description of what you can do at work. > Why should I be able to contribute anything when nobody has told me what I actually can do? That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, and her question sits underneath almost every attempt to list your own traits and skills. Nobody will hand you the answer in advance. You find it by looking at what you have already done and asking the people who saw you do it. If you want a structured starting point for that, [a short work-skills self-check](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) gives you a baseline to set beside other people's view of you, and anything it shows as thin is a skill you can build rather than a fixed gap. ## How to make each trait and skill believable A trait word on its own, such as hardworking, dependable or team player, carries almost no information, because anyone can write it. What makes it credible is a specific behavior in a specific situation, with a result. That is why interviewers ask you to describe a time you did something rather than whether you have a quality: the example is the evidence. Build each item on your shortlist the same way. Name the trait or skill, describe the situation, say what you did, and finish with what happened. Then let the example carry the claim; often the adjective becomes unnecessary. If you cannot find an example for a word, drop the word and choose one you can back. Your raw material is any setting where someone else could watch you work. According to NACE, [internship experience](/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-and-experience/) is often the deciding factor between otherwise equal candidates, and the reason is the same: experience is where traits and skills turn into behavior another person has seen. A student job, a volunteer role, a club you helped run or a demanding group project gives you that same kind of material. A short list with a real story behind each entry beats a long one with none. ## The skills that make your list hold up Look back across the nine entries and the advice on choosing and proving them, and the same few things keep surfacing: knowing what is actually true of you, behaving in ways other people can see, and being someone a group can rely on. **Building Self-Awareness** is where the list begins. Before any word goes on a resume, you need a clear view of your natural strengths: the things you do well and that give you energy, not just the things you can manage. Asking someone who has watched you work for specific feedback then tests your picks against how you actually come across. What you end up with is a short self-description you can defend, and a better sense of which roles will put those strengths to use. **Professional Behaviors** turn many of the traits on any list into something visible. Humble, curious and positive look like showing humility, showing genuine interest in other people, seeking the positive and being open to change, while dependable starts with simply being on time. Seen this way, the traits stop being a question of personality and become conduct anyone can practice, and each one hands you a concrete example to offer instead of an adjective. **Teamwork** gives the most overused words on a resume their working meaning. Reliable, honest and trustworthy are, in practice, how a team builds trust: being sincere and meaning what you say, doing what you commit to, being authentic. Point to a moment when you shared what you knew, gave the group credit, or delivered something others were waiting on, and team player stops sounding like a slogan. Whether each of these already works in your favor is something you can check rather than guess. The free Job Skills Test [rates your work skills one by one](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), these three included, and shows which ones already give your list solid behavior to point to and which are worth practicing next. It covers **twelve skills in all**, and every one of them can be learned without changing who you are. Parts of this list may already have a story attached in your mind. If you have been the one a manager trusted to close up at the end of the night, or the person your study group waited for before splitting up the work, dependability and initiative are already on record; what remains is telling it plainly. The entries without a story yet are not holes in your character. They are behaviors you have not had much reason to practice, and you can build them while staying entirely yourself, starting with the ones that matter most for the roles you want. As you take on more, people tend to judge you by what they have watched you do rather than by the words you chose for yourself. That makes now, while your track record is still short, a good moment to see where you stand. ## Find out which traits and skills you can already prove You have the list and a way to prove each entry; the missing piece is knowing which of your skills are already strong. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it maps where you stand across all twelve and shows which ones would do most to back up the traits and skills you want to claim. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free and takes 7 minutes, with your results 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? A list of traits and skills employers value, from dependability to teamwork and written communication, plus how to pick yours and back each with an example. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Professional Behaviors, Teamwork. ### 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/personal-qualities.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities/list-of-traits-and-skills/ Preferred summary: "A list of traits and skills employers value, from dependability to teamwork and written communication, plus how to pick yours and back each with an example." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.