# Necessary Skills: The Short List That Matters at Work Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/necessary-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/necessary-skills.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 necessary skills for work are mostly nontechnical: communication, teamwork, reliability, planning and initiative. See what each looks like in a first job. ## Key facts - Title: Necessary Skills: The Short List That Matters at Work - Category: Skills Standards and Frameworks - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Professional Behaviors, Time Management - Primary keyword: necessary skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/necessary-skills/ ## What this page covers - The necessary skills for work are mostly nontechnical: communication, teamwork, reliability, planning and initiative. See what each looks like in a first job. - Practical guidance for necessary skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The necessary skills for work are mostly the ones a transcript never shows. Employers treat your qualifications as the entry ticket, then look for how you work: communicating clearly in writing and out loud, working in a team, being reliable, organizing your own workload, making sound decisions, taking initiative and knowing yourself. That core is short, stable and learnable. If you are about to graduate, or a year or two into your first job, the long lists in job ads can make it feel as if you need everything at once. You do not. Underneath the variety, employers keep asking for the same handful of things, and once you see why, they become much easier to build. ## Why necessary skills go beyond your degree The idea that school alone does not make someone ready for work is not new. In the United States, the Department of Labor once set up a body with the phrase in its own name, the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), to identify and describe the skills that work actually requires. Its starting point is still the right one: what gets graded in school is the base, not the whole building. Current hiring data says the same. In NACE's Job Outlook 2025 survey of 237 employers, nearly 90% said they look for evidence that a student can solve problems, and roughly 80% look for teamwork. Written communication, initiative, work ethic and technical skills each matter to at least 70% of those employers. Technical skill is on the list, but it is one item among many, and most of what gets [screened on a résumé](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/how-to-list-soft-skills-on-resume/) is how you work rather than what you studied. The gap is real, and it is common. A survey of 392 Italian managers, published in the Sinergie Italian Journal of Management, ranked 25 workplace skills both by how much employers value them and by how satisfied they are with graduates' proficiency, and found significant gaps between the two. These skills are rarely taught on purpose, so most people arrive at their first job with them unevenly developed. That is not a verdict on you. It is simply the normal starting point, and it means that showing these skills early is one of the clearest ways to stand out. If you have already felt that distance between finishing your courses and feeling ready, you are in good company. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work told us: > 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. Her degree mattered; it is what made her worth taking in. What she discovered is that the rest is learned on the job, and that it can be learned deliberately rather than by trial and error. ## The necessary skills employers keep asking for The seven below are parallel, not sequential. You can work on them in any order, and you will almost certainly find you are further along in some than in others. ### 1. Communicating clearly, in writing and out loud Written communication matters to at least 70% of the employers in NACE's survey, and verbal communication to more than two-thirds. A Boston University doctoral study of entry-level clerical workers reached a similar conclusion for even the most junior roles: written and oral communication needed more emphasis, alongside planning, organizing and decision-making. In a first job, this is less about eloquence than about being easy to understand. You state the main point first, keep emails short enough to act on, ask a question when something is unclear instead of guessing, and speak up in a meeting when you have something useful to add. ### 2. Working as part of a team Roughly 80% of NACE's employers look for teamwork, and a study of 83 Spanish graduate employers from the University of Santiago de Compostela found that the most-demanded skills centered on interpersonal relationships. On a working day, teamwork means doing your own part well and then asking where the team needs you: sharing what you know, coordinating with colleagues instead of working around them, and [keeping disagreements about the issue](/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-disagree-respectfully/) rather than the person. ### 3. Being reliable and acting with integrity Work ethic matters to at least 70% of NACE's employers, and a 2025 study of Tanzanian employers, published by the University of Dar es Salaam, found integrity among the qualities they valued most in graduates. Reliability is built from small, visible behaviors: being on time, following through on what you said you would do, treating everyone with the same respect regardless of role, and handling confidential information carefully. These norms are seldom written down, which is exactly why they are worth learning on purpose. ### 4. Planning and organizing your own work Planning and organizing were among the entry-level priorities in the Boston University study, and they are expected from your first weeks rather than later in your career. When someone hands you a task, clarify who needs it, what exactly they want, when it is genuinely due and what will count as done. Then break it into steps, keep a to-do list, and put the important work ahead of whatever happens to [feel most urgent](/knowledge/time-management/time-management-urgent-important/). ### 5. Making sound decisions within your role Nearly 90% of NACE's employers want evidence that a candidate can solve problems. Early in a career, that ability shows up mostly in everyday decision-making, which the Boston University study also named as a priority. It starts with knowing which calls are yours to make and which belong to someone else. Within that space, good decisions come from getting a second opinion from someone more experienced, slowing down when you feel rushed, relying on facts rather than hunches, and accepting a good-enough answer instead of waiting for a perfect one. ### 6. Taking initiative Initiative matters to at least 70% of NACE's employers, and entrepreneurship was among the most-demanded skill areas in the Spanish employer study. You do not need a title to show it. Being willing to ask, volunteering to write the meeting summary or prepare the agenda, and bringing a proposed solution along with a problem all count, and they are noticed precisely because nobody asked you to do them. ### 7. Knowing and managing yourself The Tanzanian study found that employers value graduates who are self-aware of workplace dynamics and can work independently, and the Spanish study placed self-management among the most-demanded areas. This is the least visible skill on the list and one of the most useful: knowing what you are genuinely good at, asking for feedback before you need it, and noticing how you react when something goes wrong. It is also what lets you talk honestly about the other six. Before your next [application or interview](/knowledge/skills-standards/behaviours-and-competencies/), it is worth taking a few minutes to [find out which ones you can already show](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), so you know where you have real examples to point to and where a gap is worth closing first. ## Why the list of necessary skills stays short Look across employer studies from different countries and sectors and the same core keeps returning: communication, teamwork, integrity and reliability, and the ability to manage yourself. What changes is emphasis. One country's employers put integrity near the top, another's put interpersonal relationships first, and the weighting shifts by industry too. That is useful to know, because it means you do not have to chase every new list. Build the core, and you are covered almost anywhere. Just as important, none of these is a personality trait. They are behaviors, and behaviors are learned through practice at work. A gap in one of them is something you have not practiced yet, not something you lack, and closing it asks you to change what you do, not who you are. ## Where to put your effort first Three of the skills above do most of the work in a first job, because they shape how colleagues experience you from day one. **Communication** is the skill people meet every time they deal with you. For someone starting out, the useful version is practical: choose a conversation for anything sensitive or complicated and writing for anything that needs a record, put your main message first, and listen closely enough to answer the question that was actually asked. It is also the skill that makes everything else you do visible. **Professional Behaviors** are the unspoken norms that decide whether people trust you with more. Showing respect, staying open to change, expressing appreciation and steering clear of passive, arrogant or negative habits all count more than any single piece of etiquette. They are learned fastest by watching how respected colleagues handle meetings and disagreements, and by asking when you are unsure. **Time Management** is where reliability actually comes from. Clarifying every new task before you start, estimating how long it will take with a buffer built in, and saying no clearly when you truly cannot take something on are what let you deliver what you promised. It is a set of habits, not a talent for being organized. The Job Skills Test shows where each of these three stands for you, together with **the other nine skills the framework covers**, so you can [pick the one to practice first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) instead of trying to improve everything at once. ## What this could mean for you Parts of this may already sound familiar. If you have ever been the one in a group project who wrote down who was doing what by when, you have already practiced the planning employers ask about. If you have ever covered a shift for a colleague at short notice and shown up on time, that was reliability in action. You do not need to become someone else to build the rest. These are skills you can grow into on your own terms, starting with the ones that matter most for you right now. They also tend to count for more as your responsibilities grow, which makes the start of a career the easiest time to strengthen them, and a clear picture of where you stand is all it takes to begin. ## See where your necessary skills stand The only step left is to find out where you are today. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your workplace skills that takes about 7 minutes. It shows where you stand across all twelve, from communication and professional behavior to time management, and points to the skills that will make the biggest difference as you move into work. ## 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 necessary skills for work are mostly nontechnical: communication, teamwork, reliability, planning and initiative. See what each looks like in a first job. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Professional Behaviors, Time Management. ### 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/skills-standards.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/time-management.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/necessary-skills/ Preferred summary: "The necessary skills for work are mostly nontechnical: communication, teamwork, reliability, planning and initiative. See what each looks like in a first job." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.