# Career Skills: Five Employers Look For, and How to Build Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/career-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/career-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 skills are the transferable skills that shape how you work with others and manage yourself. Five employers look for, and how new graduates measure up. ## Key facts - Title: Career Skills: Five Employers Look For, and How to Build Them - Category: Soft Skills at Work - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: career skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/career-skills/ ## What this page covers - Career skills are the transferable skills that shape how you work with others and manage yourself. Five employers look for, and how new graduates measure up. - Practical guidance for career skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Career skills are the transferable skills that decide how well you work with other people and manage yourself at work: communicating clearly, working in a team, behaving professionally, leading without a title, and steering your own development. Unlike technical knowledge, they are not tied to one field, and every one of them can be learned. If you are about to graduate, or a year or two into your first job, you have probably seen the term in job ads and on career-center checklists, usually without anyone spelling out what it asks of you. The harder question is whether you already have these skills, and on that point employers and graduates often see things very differently. That difference is the most useful place to start, because it shows you where effort will count. ## What career skills are, and how they differ from what you studied Technical skills belong to a field: tax law, a statistics package, CAD drawing, a nursing procedure. They are what a degree is built to teach, and they often decide whether an application gets past the first screen. Career skills sit around them. They govern how you communicate, how you work alongside other people, how you conduct yourself, and how you manage your own growth, and they come with you into every job you will ever hold. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) draws the line in the same place. Its definition of [career readiness](/knowledge/skills-standards/nace-competencies/), developed by career-services and HR professionals on the basis of research among employers, is the ability to demonstrate the core competencies that prepare graduates for the move into the workplace, and it deliberately covers only transferable skills rather than the knowledge of any one field. NACE names eight such competencies, among them communication, teamwork, professionalism, leadership, and career and self-development, and it presents them as a menu to draw on in any combination rather than a checklist to complete. What makes these skills hard to pin down is that they are rarely taught directly. Much of what they involve is unwritten: when to speak up, how to word a request to someone senior, what "on time" really means in a particular team. So most people pick them up by trial and error, often in a student job or an internship. > 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 was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, looking back on her student job. None of what she learned competes with her degree. It is the layer around it, and because that layer is made of behaviors rather than personality, it can be learned on purpose instead of by accident. ## Five career skills employers look for, and how new graduates measure up The five below shape how you come across in your first months at work. For each one: what it looks like on the job, how to show it when you apply, and how to build it from where you are now. ### 1. Communication At work, communication is judged in short, practical exchanges: an email a busy colleague reads on a phone, a two-minute update in a meeting, a question asked at the right moment. Academic writing trains you to show everything you know. Workplace communication asks you to get something done in as few words as the reader needs. This is one of the places where the distance between graduates and employers is greatest. In NACE's Job Outlook 2022 survey, employers rated communication at 4.56 out of 5 for importance but rated new graduates' proficiency at only 3.64. The 2025 data shows the same gap from another angle: 78.1% of students rate themselves proficient communicators, while 53.5% of employers rate new graduates proficient. To show it, treat your application as the first sample of how you communicate: a cover letter that states in its opening lines what you are applying for and why you fit, and interview answers that give the point first and the example second. To build it, practice explaining a piece of your own work out loud in two minutes to a friend outside your field, and notice where they lose the thread. Once you are in a job, watch which of your emails trigger a follow-up question; each one shows you what was unclear. ### 2. Professionalism Professionalism is less about dress codes than about reliability and respect in small things: arriving on time, doing what you said you would by when you said you would, treating the receptionist and the director with the same courtesy, and handling the administrative side of a job without complaint. Most of these norms are never written down, which is why it is possible to believe you are professional while missing several of them. The figures follow the same pattern as communication. In the Job Outlook 2022 survey, employers rated professionalism at 4.20 for importance against 3.46 for new graduates' proficiency. In the 2025 data, 79.7% of students rated themselves proficient, while 50.3% of employers rated new graduates proficient, an even wider distance than for communication. To show it, offer evidence of reliability instead of adjectives: a part-time job you kept through exam periods, a responsibility you were trusted with, a reference who can speak to how you work. The interview itself counts as well, since arriving prepared and on time is professionalism in action. To build it, ask early in a new role what good looks like there (how fast emails are answered, how meetings run, what you can decide without asking) and watch how respected colleagues handle the small things. ### 3. Teamwork Teamwork at work differs from a group project in one important way: there is no shared grade at the end, only shared results, and the people you depend on may come from different backgrounds and have different priorities from yours. Here the picture is more encouraging. In NACE's Job Outlook 2025 data, 81.5% of employers rated new graduates proficient in teamwork, close to the 83.5% of students who rated themselves proficient. It is the competency where a graduate's own sense of their ability and an employer's view come closest to agreeing. That makes teamwork a good place to anchor your applications, as long as you can show it concretely. Pick an example where you did what the team needed beyond your own part, and describe the team's result with "we" and your contribution with "I," so the interviewer can see both. To build it further, look for work that puts you alongside people outside your own discipline, where coordinating takes more effort than it does among classmates. ### 4. Career and self-development This is the skill of knowing what you are good at, finding out where you fall short, and choosing your next steps deliberately rather than following a plan someone else made for you. In practice it means [asking for feedback](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/ask-for-feedback-at-work/), noticing which tasks give you both energy and results, and treating your first years of work as exploration, with plans that look six to eighteen months ahead rather than ten years. It matters more than it looks, because it is the skill that makes the other four improvable. When self-ratings and employer ratings can drift as far apart as they do on communication and professionalism, the habit of seeking an honest outside view is what closes the distance. To show it, describe a piece of feedback you received and what you changed afterward; that one story demonstrates self-awareness and follow-through at the same time. To build it, ask one specific, forward-looking question after a task, such as what you could do differently next time, rather than a general "how did I do?" ### 5. Leadership For a new graduate, leadership rarely means managing people. It means [influence without a title](/knowledge/influence/influence-at-work/): delivering consistently so that people trust your work, volunteering to prepare the agenda or write the summary, and thinking through what a proposal means for the people it affects before you make it. Influence earned that way is what gets you trusted with more. To show it, describe a time you took initiative that nobody asked for, such as organizing a study group, fixing a clumsy routine at a part-time job, or picking up a task that had stalled, and say what changed because of it. To build it, start small and visible: offer to take the notes and send the follow-up after the next meeting you attend, then do it every time. ## Why your own rating of these skills is not enough Put the figures side by side and a pattern appears. On communication and professionalism, students rate themselves far more proficient than employers rate new graduates. On teamwork, the two views roughly agree. A self-rating is made against the standards you know, mostly from school; an employer's rating is made against the standards of the job. Neither is dishonest, but they are measuring different things. This is why writing "excellent communication skills" on a [resume](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/career-skills-resume/) does so little. Knowing the name of a skill does not show an employer the skill. What shows it is evidence (specific situations, what you did, what came of it), and the most reliable way to find out where your evidence is thin is to ask people who see your work: a supervisor from a part-time job, a teammate, your manager in your first months. Before you ask, it helps to know which skills to ask about. [Mapping your work skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) in a structured way gives you a starting list, so the feedback you request goes where it can change the most, and every gap it surfaces is a behavior you can practice rather than a trait you are stuck with. ## What employers notice first Look again at where the gaps sit and where they do not. The large gaps are in communication and professional conduct, the one point of agreement is teamwork, and none of the three turns on anything you studied. Each is made of small, repeated behaviors that colleagues notice in your first weeks, long before anyone judges your technical work. **Communication** is mostly a set of habits rather than a talent: putting your main point first, keeping a message as short as the reader needs, giving the other person your full attention while they talk, and speaking up when you have something useful to add instead of waiting until it feels perfect. You get a chance to practice these in every email and meeting, which is why communication improves fastest when you work on one habit at a time. **Teamwork** asks you to be excellent in your own role while keeping an eye on where the team needs you, to share what you know rather than guard it, and to do what you committed to, every time. It also includes disagreeing well: raising a concern about the work rather than the person, then backing the decision once it is made. Being easy to get along with is not the same thing, because a team needs your honest view as much as your cooperation. **Professional Behaviors** are the unwritten rulebook of a workplace, made visible: being on time, showing genuine interest in colleagues' work, thanking people for their help, and speaking about others as if they were in the room. Just as important are the behaviors to avoid, such as staying silent and passive in meetings, coming across as superior, or slipping into habitual complaining. None of this calls for long hours or constant availability; it calls for consistency in how you treat people. A **free Job Skills Test** will show you which of these you can [put forward in applications](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and which to practice first, scoring all three as part of a set of **twelve work skills**. A lower score on any of them points to habits you can start on in your next email or meeting, not to a limit on what you can become. Some of this may already be part of how you work, even if you have never called it a skill. If you have rewritten a cover letter so its first sentence says exactly what you are applying for, or been the one in a group project who noticed nobody had taken on the references and quietly did them, you have practiced communication and teamwork in a form an employer would recognize. Gaps that nobody names tend to get mistaken for personality, by you as much as by anyone else, and they can stay in place for years. A named gap is different: it is a behavior you can change while staying exactly who you are. The aim is not to fix everything at once but to find the one or two skills that matter most for you right now, and that starts with seeing your own pattern clearly. ## Find out which career skills to build first All that remains is to swap a guess about your skills for a clear picture. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in about 7 minutes it scores you across all twelve, including communication, teamwork and professional behaviors, and shows which ones would make the biggest difference to your applications and your first years at work. **[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 skills are the transferable skills that shape how you work with others and manage yourself. Five employers look for, and how new graduates measure up. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Teamwork, 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/soft-skills-at-work.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.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/soft-skills-at-work/career-skills/ Preferred summary: "Career skills are the transferable skills that shape how you work with others and manage yourself. Five employers look for, and how new graduates measure up." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.