# The Skills to Have Early in Your Career, and How to Show Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/skills-to-have/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/skills-to-have.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 have for a first job: what employers rank highest, how these skills differ from technical ones, and how to back each one up with evidence. ## Key facts - Title: The Skills to Have Early in Your Career, and How to Show Them - Category: Skills Standards and Frameworks - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Time Management - Primary keyword: skills to have - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/skills-to-have/ ## What this page covers - The skills to have for a first job: what employers rank highest, how these skills differ from technical ones, and how to back each one up with evidence. - Practical guidance for skills to have - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The skills to have early in your career are the ones every job draws on: communicating clearly, working well in a team, solving problems, taking initiative, behaving professionally and knowing your own strengths and gaps. Employers hiring graduates rank skills like these at the top of their lists, and every one of them can be learned. If it feels as though everyone else arrived at work already knowing these things, they didn't. Most people pick them up by trial and error, which is slow, and some never fully do. Learning them on purpose is faster: know which skills matter, what each one looks like in practice, and how to show you have it. That last part, showing it, turns out to matter almost as much as the skills themselves. ## Six skills to have early in your career According to the Job Outlook 2025 survey by NACE (the National Association of Colleges and Employers), employers hiring new graduates rate problem solving and teamwork as the most important attributes they look for, followed by written communication, initiative and a strong work ethic. The reason is practical. Entry-level work is done mostly with other people and rarely arrives as a neatly defined assignment, so how you work and how you handle problems count alongside what you know. The six skills below cover that ground, and each is something you build through practice, not a trait you either have or lack. ### 1. Communication NACE's career readiness framework breaks communication into behaviors other people can see: adjusting how you communicate to your audience, asking good questions, and giving and receiving feedback. In a first job, that shows up in small, constant ways. An email states its main point in the first line. A question gets asked early instead of a mistake being discovered late. In a meeting, you speak up once with something useful rather than staying silent throughout. Written communication sits directly behind problem solving and teamwork in the employer ranking, which makes sense: much of a new hire's work reaches colleagues and clients in writing long before they have formed an impression any other way. ### 2. Teamwork NACE describes teamwork as building and maintaining collaborative relationships to work toward common goals while valuing differences. The word "maintaining" is what separates it from a graded group project. A project team dissolves when the grade arrives; at work, you'll be with the same people next month, so how you handle a disagreement today shapes whether they trust you tomorrow. In practice, teamwork means doing what you said you would, sharing what you know, and giving credit to the team instead of collecting it for yourself. ### 3. Decision-Making Problem solving shares the top of NACE's employer ranking with teamwork, and at work most problems arrive as judgment calls rather than questions with one right answer. Making those calls well is a skill. It starts with knowing which decisions are yours to make and which belong to your manager. It continues with getting a second opinion from someone more experienced, accepting "good enough" when perfect would cost too much time, and watching for traps such as looking only for information that confirms what you already think. Bringing your manager a problem together with a considered suggestion is the everyday version of this skill. ### 4. Getting and Applying Influence Initiative appears in NACE's employer ranking as an attribute in its own right, and at entry level it is where influence begins. It means being willing to ask, since the worst answer is no; volunteering to prepare the agenda, write the summary or organize the next step; and noticing an opportunity nobody has claimed yet. Over time, that builds a reputation for delivering, which is what gets your ideas heard when you don't have a title to back them. For someone new, influence is less about persuading senior people and more about becoming someone whose work makes others want to listen. ### 5. Professional Behaviors A strong work ethic is on NACE's list of what employers look for, and professionalism is one of NACE's eight [career readiness competencies](/knowledge/skills-standards/nace-competencies/). [Most of it is unwritten](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/office-etiquette/): being on time, dressing for your role, treating everyone with the same respect regardless of rank, talking about colleagues as if they were in the room, and handling confidential information with care. It also means steering clear of the habits that quietly wear down a reputation, such as constant complaining or passing on gossip. Because few people spell these rules out, the quickest way to learn them is to watch how respected colleagues behave and to ask when you're unsure. ### 6. Building Self-Awareness NACE's Career & Self-Development competency includes knowing your own [strengths and weaknesses](/knowledge/setting-goals/strengths-and-weaknesses/), which makes self-awareness a skill to have in its own right rather than a step you take before the others. It's what turns a general list into a personal one: recognizing what you're naturally good at, asking for specific, future-focused feedback, and noticing when a belief about yourself makes criticism feel bigger than it is. It's also how you decide which of the other five deserve your attention first. ## How these skills differ from technical skills Job skills come in two kinds. Hard skills are technical and tied to a particular job or field: a programming language, an accounting method, a lab technique. The six skills above are the other kind, the skills for working with others and managing yourself, and they carry over from one job, employer and industry to the next. That difference matters for where you invest early. Your technical toolkit will change with each role; these skills keep their value whatever comes next. A degree is built mainly to develop the first kind. The second kind tends to grow through practice in real situations, often around the edges of the work itself. If a part-time job ever felt like time away from your real studies, you're in good company. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work told us: > I would feel a week had gone by without working on anything relevant to my degree — but I was learning other things. How to behave at a workplace, how to write a professional email, how to greet someone far more important than yourself, how to book a meeting. Not much academically; it's everything around it I learned. That isn't a case against studying. It shows where the second kind of skill comes from, and it means you can seek out those situations on purpose instead of waiting to absorb the skills by accident. ## How to show the skills you have Having a skill and showing it are different things, and hiring increasingly turns on the second. NACE defines career readiness as attaining and demonstrating the competencies that prepare graduates for a successful move into the workplace. Close to two-thirds of employers in its Job Outlook 2025 survey said they use [skills-based hiring](/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-based-approach/) for entry-level roles, mostly when screening and interviewing candidates. In practice, an employer is looking past the words "strong communicator" for evidence that you have actually communicated well somewhere. The raw material is usually already there. NACE advises graduates to highlight the skills they developed through their classwork and experiential assignments. A group project where you got the team to agree on a plan after a disagreement is evidence of teamwork. A presentation where you took a question you couldn't answer and followed up with the answer the next day is evidence of communication. A student job where you spotted a recurring problem and suggested a fix is evidence of initiative. For each skill you claim, name one situation, what you did, and what came of it. You don't need all six at once. Progress spread across six fronts is hard to notice, so two or three at a time works better: one you can already show and want to strengthen, and one where you don't yet have an example. A missing example is useful information rather than a verdict, because it tells you where to practice next. If you'd like a clearer picture before your next application, [check which skills you can claim](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) with the free Job Skills Test, so you lead with real strengths. ## Three skills you can practice from your first week Look across the six and a pattern appears. Almost every one of them is exercised through the same few everyday moves: how you get a message across, how you work alongside the people around you, and how you handle the tasks and deadlines you're given. **Communication** is the skill that makes every other one visible, because a good decision nobody understood, or an initiative nobody heard about, counts for little. In a first job it rests on a handful of habits you can start on immediately: put your main point first, keep messages brief, listen to understand rather than to reply, and speak up when you have something useful to add. None of that calls for being a natural talker or a polished presenter. **Teamwork** is less about getting along than about being someone the team can count on. That means doing what you committed to, sharing what you know, and putting the team's goal ahead of your own credit. It also means disagreeing when you have reason to, keeping it about the issue rather than the person, and then committing to the decision the team makes, even when it wasn't your preference. Silent agreement isn't the goal. **Time Management** is where the move from a syllabus to a job bites hardest, because work requests rarely come with fixed deadlines and clear criteria. The habit that helps most is clarifying before you start: who is asking, what exactly they need, when it's really due, and what finished looks like. From there, it's putting the important ahead of the merely urgent, cutting the distractions you can control, and, once you've earned some credibility, saying no with a reason. Each of these improves with deliberate practice, and the free Job Skills Test shows how yours compare, scoring these three alongside **nine other work skills** so you can [find your best starting point](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) instead of guessing at it. ## You may have started already Chances are a few of these skills are already showing up in your week. If you've been the one in a group chat who asked what "by Friday" actually meant, or who kept a shared deadline from slipping between a shift and two assignments, you've practiced the core of two of them without calling it that. Building the rest is a matter of doing more of it on purpose, as yourself, not of becoming a different kind of person. Once your work starts depending on other people's trust and timing, these skills decide much of how it goes, and building them while the stakes are still modest lets you practice without much riding on each attempt. What helps now is a clear read on where you stand. ## Take stock before your next step From here, it comes down to seeing your own starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. In 7 minutes, it shows where you stand across the twelve skills it measures and which of them would make the biggest difference before your next application, interview or first months in a job. ## 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 have for a first job: what employers rank highest, how these skills differ from technical ones, and how to back each one up with evidence. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Teamwork, 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/teamwork.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/skills-to-have/ Preferred summary: "The skills to have for a first job: what employers rank highest, how these skills differ from technical ones, and how to back each one up with evidence." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.