# The Skills You Need for Work, and How to Tell Which You Have Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/skills-you-need/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/skills-you-need.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 The skills you need for work: the job-specific ones, the core every job shares, what employers screen new graduates for, and how to find your own gaps. ## Key facts - Title: The Skills You Need for Work, and How to Tell Which You Have - Category: Skills Standards and Frameworks - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Communication, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: skills you need - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/skills-you-need/ ## What this page covers - The skills you need for work: the job-specific ones, the core every job shares, what employers screen new graduates for, and how to find your own gaps. - Practical guidance for skills you need - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation The skills you need for work come in two layers: the technical skills of a specific job, which education and training largely cover, and a shared core every job draws on — communicating, working with others, managing your time and yourself. Employers hiring new graduates weigh that core heavily, and all of it can be learned. If every job ad, career talk and well-meaning relative seems to add another "essential" skill, the list starts to feel endless, and it gets hard to tell what you already have. It is shorter than it looks once you see how it is put together. The part that takes real work is the part no general list can answer: which of these skills you, specifically, need next. ## The three kinds of skills you need Every job combines two things: skills specific to that role, and skills common to almost every role. The specific set changes each time you change jobs. The common set — communicating, planning and managing your time, working with others, holding up under pressure — goes with you. A third category, transferable skills, cuts across both, and it is the one people most often underestimate in themselves. Seen this way, the skills you need stop being one long list and become a shared core plus a layer that depends on the job. ### Hard skills: what a specific job requires Hard skills are the teachable, specific knowledge and techniques you get from education, training or experience: a programming language, a particular piece of software, operating a machine. They differ from job to job and industry to industry, which is why job ads spell them out in detail. This is the layer you can see most clearly, and early in a career it is often the layer that is best covered already. Your degree or training supplies much of it, and the rest is typically taught on the job. A long technical wish list in an ad describes the role; it is not the whole of what the job will ask of you. ### Interpersonal and self-management skills: what every job shares The second layer, often called soft skills, covers how you work with other people and how you manage yourself: communicating clearly, working in a team, working with your manager, managing your time, making sound decisions, building confidence and recovering from setbacks. These skills are harder to observe and measure than technical ones, and partly for that reason they are rarely taught directly; most people pick them up by trial and error. Hard to measure does not mean inborn, though. They are behaviors, and behaviors can be learned and practiced. They also count from the very first hiring decision. According to NACE's Job Outlook 2025 survey, problem-solving is the attribute employers most look for on new graduates' resumes, with nearly 90% saying they look for evidence of it. The ability to work in a team ranks second, followed by written communication, and more than three-quarters of the employers surveyed look for evidence of communication skills. The reason is practical: a new graduate has little work history to judge, so employers look for signs of how you handle problems and people instead. And at work, problem-solving rarely happens alone. It depends on weighing options well, involving the right people and explaining what you found. ### Transferable skills: what you take with you Transferable skills are defined less by what kind of skill they are than by where they go: they are the skills you carry from one job or setting to the next. They can be hard or soft. Being fluent with spreadsheets is a technical skill that transfers to almost any office role; explaining a complicated point simply is an interpersonal one that transfers everywhere. So transferable skills overlap with the second layer without being the same thing. For a student or recent graduate, this is the category with hidden stock in it. Studies, part-time jobs and volunteering have usually built more of these skills than you give yourself credit for. A group project is practice in coordinating work and holding each other to deadlines; a weekend job serving customers is practice in staying courteous under pressure. The work lies in recognizing them and putting a name to them. ## Why employers look for evidence, not labels Nearly two-thirds of employers surveyed by NACE say they use skills-based hiring to help identify candidates, judging what a person can demonstrably do alongside or instead of their degree, major or grades. That shifts the useful question from which credentials you hold to which skills you can name and show. Showing is the hard part. Writing "strong communication skills" [on a resume](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/people-skills-on-resume/) tells an employer almost nothing, because anyone can write it. A specific example does the work: the time you explained a technical result to people outside your field, or kept a group project on track when a deadline moved. Communication matters twice over here, because it is both a skill employers look for and the way every other skill gets shown, in an application, an interview or the first weeks of a job. The list does not freeze once you are hired, either. The right knowledge and skills can get you a job, but continuing to learn is what lets you succeed in it, because the skills a role asks for shift as the role itself changes. ## How to work out which skills you need A general list tells you what matters. It cannot tell you which of those skills you already have, and a degree does not settle that question either: what a qualification says you can do and what you feel able to do on your first Monday at work are not the same thing. > One thing is what the university says the degree qualifies you for. Another is whether I, as a student, can honestly feel I can do those things when I apply. That came from one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, and the gap she describes is one you can narrow on purpose. Three moves do most of it. 1. Look for evidence. For each skill in the shared core — communicating, working in a team, managing your time, handling setbacks — find a concrete moment from your studies, a job or volunteering where you used it. Where an example comes easily, you have the skill in some form, and something to show for it. Where nothing comes, you have probably found a gap. 2. [Ask someone who sees you work](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/ask-for-feedback-at-work/). Self-assessment misses blind spots, because you cannot see how you come across. Ask a supervisor, manager or project lead directly what you do well and what needs work, and ask for training or practice in the areas you lack. One specific thing to do differently is more useful than an overall verdict. 3. [Pick two or three](/knowledge/improve-skills/skills-development-plan/), not twelve. Trying to fix everything at once makes progress invisible. Choose a couple of gaps that matter for the work in front of you, and build from what you are already good at rather than spending all your energy on your weakest point. Your own impression is a reasonable place to begin, but it helps to have an outside reference point to set it against. You can [get a baseline of your skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) with the free Job Skills Test before you choose which two or three to work on. ## The skills that make the list your own Look at what those three moves actually asked of you: an honest read of yourself, the ability to describe what you did, and a feel for the unwritten rules of how work gets done. Each of those is a skill in its own right. **Building Self-Awareness** is what turns a general list into a personal one. It starts with knowing what you are genuinely good at, not merely competent at, and it grows through feedback: asking specific, future-focused questions of the people who see your work, then reflecting on what they tell you. It also changes how you read a gap. A skill you have not developed yet is not a verdict on you; it is the next thing to learn, and your strengths tell you where to build from. **Communication** sounds both obvious and vague until you break it into habits. Put your main point first. Be clear and brief. Give people your full attention when they talk. Write emails that get read, and speak up in meetings when you have something to add. Nearly every other skill on the list reaches people through how you talk, listen and write, which is why this one is worth practicing deliberately rather than leaving to talent. **Professional Behaviors** are the unwritten rules many of the skills you need quietly rest on: being on time, treating everyone with the same respect, showing genuine interest in colleagues, saying thank you, and steering clear of the passive, arrogant or negative habits that wear down working relationships. They are seldom taught, which is exactly why they belong on your list. Knowing them takes a minute; showing them reliably, including on the days you are rushed or tired, is what colleagues actually notice. Of the three, self-awareness is the hardest to build from the inside alone. The **free Job Skills Test** covers it along with the other two and nine more workplace skills, and it shows your strengths as clearly as your gaps, so you can [find the strengths to lead with](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) when you describe yourself to an employer and know which skill to practice next. ## Where you are starting from Chances are a few of these skills already show up in your week. If you have been the person in a group project who wrote up what was agreed so nobody had to guess, or the one who arrived early for a shift because the handover mattered to the next person, you already have a working example of two of them. Gaps in the rest are not fixed. They are behaviors you have not practiced yet, and practicing them does not require becoming someone else. The shared core tends to count for more as your work comes to involve more people and bigger decisions, so finding your gaps early gives you time to close them while there is still room to experiment. What remains is a clear picture of where you stand today. ## Turn the general list into yours From here, the useful move is to swap the general list for your own. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: it takes 7 minutes, shows where you stand across all twelve skills it measures, and points to the ones that would make the biggest difference for you right now, whether you are preparing applications or settling into a first role. ## 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 you need for work: the job-specific ones, the core every job shares, what employers screen new graduates for, and how to find your own gaps. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Communication, 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/skills-standards.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.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/skills-standards/skills-you-need/ Preferred summary: "The skills you need for work: the job-specific ones, the core every job shares, what employers screen new graduates for, and how to find your own gaps." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.