# Required Skills: What Employers Ask For, and What They Assume Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/required-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/required-skills.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving professional behaviors at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Required skills are the must-haves in a job ad, but employers also assume skills they never write down. Learn the four types and how to rate yourself. ## Key facts - Title: Required Skills: What Employers Ask For, and What They Assume - Category: Skills Standards and Frameworks - Primary skill: Professional Behaviors - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Communication - Primary keyword: required skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/required-skills/ ## What this page covers - Required skills are the must-haves in a job ad, but employers also assume skills they never write down. Learn the four types and how to rate yourself. - Practical guidance for required skills - How this topic connects to Professional Behaviors ## Detailed explanation Required skills are the abilities an employer says a candidate must have to be considered for a job. In a job posting, they usually mean job-specific skills such as particular software, a technique or a certification, plus general ones like communication and teamwork. Behind that written list sits a second set employers assume: how you conduct yourself at work. If you are finishing your studies or early in your first job, a long list of requirements can feel like a test you have failed before you even apply. It rarely is. Once you see that the list mixes hard gates, wishes and expectations nobody writes down, it becomes something you can measure yourself against, and work on. ## The four types of required skills Not every skill a job asks for is the same kind of requirement. Some are written down and easy to test, some are written down but vague, some are never written down at all, and some are not strictly required. Knowing which type you are looking at tells you how to prepare for it, and how much it should worry you. ### Job-specific technical skills These are the skills tied directly to the tasks of the role: a programming language, accounting software, a lab technique, a foreign language, a particular certification. They change from job to job, which is why postings in different fields rarely share them, and they are the easiest type to test. Some of them are genuine gates. A professional license, a legal right to work in the country or a certification the role depends on cannot be worked around, and applying without one usually wastes the application. Other technical requirements describe the ideal candidate rather than a hard minimum. This is also the type where a gap is quickest to close: a course, a certification or a small project can often take you from "not yet" to "I can show it." ### Transferable core competencies A second type appears in job ads across almost every field: communication, teamwork, professionalism, a strong work ethic. NACE, the US-based National Association of Colleges and Employers, defines [career readiness](/knowledge/skills-standards/nace-competencies/) through core competencies of exactly this kind, among them communication, critical thinking, teamwork, professionalism, leadership, technology, and career and self-development. They are transferable, applying whether the job is in finance, engineering or health care, which is why very different postings so often ask for the same handful. They also weigh heavily. In a 2016 NACE survey, employers rated four of these competencies as the most essential for college graduates: critical thinking and problem solving, professionalism and work ethic, teamwork and collaboration, and oral and written communication. Three of those four are about how you work with other people and conduct yourself, not about what you know technically. What makes this type tricky is the wording. "Excellent communication skills" or "team player" says little about what the job actually involves, and anyone can type it into a résumé. That is why employers check these requirements through evidence rather than claims: a concrete example in your résumé or cover letter, a behavioral interview question about a situation you handled, and your own conduct during the process, from how clearly your emails read to whether you arrive on time for the interview. For each vague requirement, translate it into a behavior you can describe, then find one real example of you doing it. ### Unwritten conduct requirements The third type never appears in the posting at all. Employers take it for granted that a new hire will be on time, reliable and respectful toward everyone regardless of role, able to take feedback without getting defensive, willing to follow procedures, and aware of what is and is not appropriate to say at work. These norms go unstated because they apply to every role, while a job ad is written around what makes this particular role different. That silence has a cost. A missing technical skill shows up in your application, but a gap here usually shows up only after you start, when it is harder to repair. The reassuring part is that these are behaviors, not personality traits, and they are learned through practice, often in student jobs, internships and volunteer roles well before a first full-time position. ### Preferred skills Many postings split their skills into two tiers. Required skills are the threshold the employer expects candidates to meet, and candidates who meet most or all of them are more likely to reach an interview. Preferred skills, sometimes labeled "nice to have" or "desirable," are extras that make a candidate more competitive without being strictly necessary. The preferred list is where qualified candidates compete with each other, not where eligibility is decided, so a gap there should never on its own stop you from applying. ## How to read a required skills list before you apply Put the four types together and a posting becomes much easier to read. Start by finding the genuine gates: a license, a certification, a legal requirement. If you lack one of those, the gap is real, and closing it comes before the application. Many of the remaining lines add up to a profile of the ideal candidate rather than a set of minimums, and treating every one of them as a hard cutoff is how capable people talk themselves out of jobs they could do. If you meet most of the required skills, can back the general ones with real examples, and know what you would still need to learn, you have a credible application. If a long list of demands has ever made a job look out of reach before you even applied, this may sound familiar. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described his own experience like this: > I was actually a bit surprised by how simple many of the tasks were. You read all these fancy job ads that expect a lot — you have to be able to do this, and that, and the other thing. But I quickly found that even though I was just the student assistant, I felt at least as competent as many of my colleagues, if not more. So in the end, that worry was proved wrong. His worry came from the list, and the job turned out to be one he could do. A list cannot tell you that on its own. An honest look at your own skills, line by line, can. ## Checking your own skills against the requirements Reading a requirements list is only useful if you compare it with yourself honestly. Rate yourself on what you have actually done, not on what you have studied: taking a course in project management and keeping a real project on schedule are different things. For the technical requirements, that judgment is fairly straightforward. For the core and unwritten ones it is harder, because people tend to misjudge which of their skills are [genuine strengths](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-identify-your-strengths/) and which are merely adequate. Asking a supervisor, manager or teammate for specific, [forward-looking feedback](/knowledge/self-awareness/questions-to-ask-for-feedback/), such as one thing you could do better in meetings, helps correct that. So does [a structured read on your workplace skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), which gives you a second view to set beside the feedback you collect. A gap you find this way is not a verdict. Missing technical skills can often be closed with a course, a certification or a project. The core and unwritten skills are built through practice: in student jobs, internships, volunteer roles and the first months of a full-time job. Either way, a gap in a requirements list is the beginning of a [development plan](/knowledge/improve-skills/skills-development-plan/). ## The skills behind the requirements nobody writes down Look again at the hardest parts of a required skills list: the vague competencies, the conduct nobody spells out, the honest comparison with yourself. None of them is about a tool or a technique. They turn on how you behave at work, how well you know your own strengths, and how clearly you get your meaning across. **Professional Behaviors** are what turn the unwritten requirements into something you can see and practice. Showing respect to everyone regardless of role, being on time, handling the administrative side of a job without complaint, and steering clear of passive or negative habits are exactly the expectations employers assume rather than advertise. Knowing them also explains why someone can tick every technical box and still struggle in their first months. **Building Self-Awareness** is what makes the line-by-line comparison honest. It means knowing which skills you are genuinely good at rather than merely competent in, judging that by how the work goes, how it feels and what results it produces, and asking others for specific feedback to find the blind spots you cannot see yourself. With that, you can match yourself to a posting realistically instead of guessing or overclaiming. **Communication** is a requirement that is usually written vaguely and checked concretely. In practice it means stating your main point first, being clear and brief, listening to understand before you answer, writing emails that lead with what the reader needs, and contributing in meetings rather than sitting through them. It is also the first evidence an employer sees: the way you describe your own skills in an application already shows how you communicate. You do not have to wait for a first performance review to learn how you come across on these. The free Job Skills Test gives you [a reading on these skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) now, and because it covers **twelve workplace skills** rather than these three alone, it also shows whether one of the others deserves your attention first. Every one of them is a behavior you can learn, so whatever the results show is something you can act on. ## Where you may already meet the requirements Some of this may already be familiar from how you work. If you have held a part-time job where you were trusted to open up on your own, you have evidence of the reliability no posting spells out. If you were the one in a group project who wrote to the client or kept track of who was doing what by when, that is communication and follow-through an employer will recognize. The rest is yours to build, at your own pace and without becoming someone else, starting with the requirements that matter most for the jobs you want next. Skills like these tend to carry more weight as a career moves on, not less, which makes the early years the easiest time to strengthen them. What you need now is a clear view of where you stand. ## Know your starting point before your next application The only thing left is to see that starting point for yourself. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your workplace skills. In about 7 minutes it shows where you stand across all twelve, from professional behavior and communication to self-awareness, and which of them will make the biggest difference for the jobs you are aiming at. ## 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? Required skills are the must-haves in a job ad, but employers also assume skills they never write down. Learn the four types and how to rate yourself. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Professional Behaviors. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, 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/skills-standards.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.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/skills-standards/required-skills/ Preferred summary: "Required skills are the must-haves in a job ad, but employers also assume skills they never write down. Learn the four types and how to rate yourself." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.