# Career Related Skills: What They Are and Which Ones Count Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/career-related-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/career-related-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 Career related skills span technical know-how, interpersonal skills, self-management and career management. What each covers and how to build them early. ## Key facts - Title: Career Related Skills: What They Are and Which Ones Count - Category: Soft Skills at Work - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Professional Behaviors, Teamwork - Primary keyword: career related skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/career-related-skills/ ## What this page covers - Career related skills span technical know-how, interpersonal skills, self-management and career management. What each covers and how to build them early. - Practical guidance for career related skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Career related skills are the abilities that carry you through working life, and they fall into four types: technical skills tied to a particular job, interpersonal skills for working with other people, self-management skills for handling yourself and your workload, and career management skills for steering where you go next. Only the first type stays with one role. Most degrees and training programs teach the first type thoroughly and leave the other three to be picked up along the way. That gap is normal, and it closes with practice, because those three are behaviors rather than talents. One word in the way employers define being ready for work shows where to start. ## What counts as career related skills The simplest division runs between technical skills and everything else. Technical skills are job-specific knowledge: programming, data analysis, accounting rules, a clinical procedure. The nontechnical skills cover how you work with others and how you manage yourself, and the difference that matters is how far each one travels. Technical knowledge belongs to a field. Nontechnical skills come with you into every job, because every job involves people, deadlines and pressure. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) worked with employers to identify eight career readiness competencies: critical thinking, communication, teamwork, technology, leadership, professionalism, career and self-development, and engagement across perspectives. NACE defines career readiness as the attainment and *demonstration* of the competencies that prepare graduates for a successful move into the workplace. That second word is the one to hold on to. Readiness is judged by what you visibly do at work, not by what you know about a skill or how many skills you [list on a resume](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/career-skills-resume/). NACE presents its competencies as relevant regardless of industry, and university career centers adapt the wording, so the list you meet at your own school may look slightly different. The labels matter less than the behaviors underneath them, and those behaviors sort into four types. ## The four types of career related skills ### Technical skills These are the skills a degree, an apprenticeship or a certification is built to deliver, and they are often what gets an application through the first screening. They are essential, and they have one limit: they are tied to a field or a role. When the job changes, part of that knowledge stays behind. For someone at the start of a career, technical skills open the door to a particular kind of work. They do little to decide how well that work goes once you are inside. ### Interpersonal skills Interpersonal skills govern how you work with others: how you communicate, how you contribute to a team, and how you relate to colleagues and to people with more authority than you, including your manager. They are the most visible of the four types. Colleagues see them every day in how you write an email, how you behave in a meeting and whether you follow through on what you said you would do. They are also the type that education covers least directly, because so much of it consists of unwritten norms. A great deal of it is learned on the job, often in a first student job or internship. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described what her student job actually taught her: > 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. None of that replaces what a degree teaches. It is the layer around the degree, and it is what lets the academic knowledge be used with and through other people. ### Self-management skills Self-management skills shape how you respond to situations, how you interact with others and how you relate to your surroundings, according to The University of Alabama Career Center, which also points out that they can be developed and shown in every area of life. In practice, this means managing your time and workload, [staying steady under pressure](/knowledge/confidence/how-to-perform-under-pressure/), building confidence in tasks that are new to you, and recovering when something goes wrong. This type sits underneath every task, which is what makes it easy to overlook. It rarely appears on a resume, yet it decides whether your technical knowledge actually gets applied on a busy Thursday with [three deadlines](/knowledge/time-management/managing-competing-priorities/) and an unhappy client. Someone with excellent technical skills and weak self-management delivers late, or delivers well once and then burns out. ### Career management skills Career management is a set of skills in its own right: reflecting on your [career path](/knowledge/setting-goals/career-path/), understanding the job market, judging whether further education is worth it, finding openings, and deciding when to change direction. Where the other three types decide how well you do a given job, this one decides which jobs you apply everything else to. At the core of it is knowing your own strengths and what you value in work, then using that knowledge to choose roles that fit, instead of following the path someone else expects of you. For someone early in a career, this is the type that turns a collection of abilities into a direction. ## How to build career related skills when your experience is thin You have more raw material than a short work history suggests. Transferable skills are skills that move from one setting to another, so group projects, part-time jobs, volunteering and student organizations all count. If you have coordinated a group assignment to a deadline, handled an impatient customer, or kept a part-time job going alongside your studies, you have practiced interpersonal and self-management skills in a real setting. What usually stops people from building more is the belief that these skills are personality: that you are simply not a people person, or simply not organized. They are learnable behaviors. Because they are so rarely taught directly, most people pick them up by trial and error, and gaps can last for years when nobody names them. Naming them is the first step. From there, three moves make the work deliberate: - **Pick one behavior at a time.** Choose something specific and observable, such as stating your main point in the first line of an email or confirming a deadline when you take on a task, and practice it until it is automatic. - **Collect evidence as you go.** Because readiness is judged by demonstration, keep short notes on situations where you used a skill and what came of it. Those notes become your answers to "tell me about a time when…" in an interview. - **Ask for specific feedback.** Ask a manager, a supervisor or a teammate what one thing you could do differently next time. A specific, forward-looking question gets a usable answer. If you are not sure which of your workplace skills are already strong enough to show an employer, it helps to [put names to your strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you start collecting evidence, so you know which stories to look for and which skills to work on. ## Where career related skills show up first Look back at the four types, and a pattern appears. The technical type opens the door, but most of what an employer actually sees in your first months comes from a handful of everyday behaviors. **Communication** is how everything else you know reaches other people. In a first job, that means communicating as the job requires, leading with your main point, keeping messages clear and brief, and adapting to the person in front of you rather than writing for a grader. It also means speaking up in meetings when you have something useful to add, because a good idea kept to yourself never becomes part of the work. **Professional Behaviors** is where colleagues form their first judgment of you. Arriving on time, treating everyone with the same respect, handling the administrative parts of the job without complaining, and speaking about people as if they were in the room all signal that you can be trusted with more. These are norms you learn, not a personality you adopt, and you can follow them and still be yourself. **Teamwork** turns your individual work into shared results. Knowing your role and asking where the team needs you, doing what you committed to, sharing what you know and giving the team the credit build the trust a career runs on. When you disagree, you say so before the decision is made, then commit to carrying it out. The **free Job Skills Test** measures all three of these, along with nine more that recur across working life, and lets you [choose which skill to practice first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). A lower score simply marks the place where deliberate practice will pay off fastest. Chances are that some of this is already part of your week. If you have been the one who sent a short recap after a group meeting so everyone knew who was doing what, or the one who covered a colleague's shift and confirmed it in writing, you have already used communication and teamwork in a form an employer recognizes. The skills you have not built yet are not fixed. They grow through practice, in your own way of working. As your responsibilities grow, more of your results tend to depend on these skills and less on what you studied, which is why starting early is worth it. What remains is knowing where you stand today. ## See where your career related skills stand The only step left is to find your starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: it scores you across all twelve and shows which ones would make the biggest difference to your career right now. It takes about 7 minutes. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes 7 minutes, 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? Career related skills span technical know-how, interpersonal skills, self-management and career management. What each covers and how to build them early. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. 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/soft-skills-at-work.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.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/soft-skills-at-work/career-related-skills/ Preferred summary: "Career related skills span technical know-how, interpersonal skills, self-management and career management. What each covers and how to build them early." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.