# How to Define Professional Skills (and Which Ones You Need) Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/define-professional-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/define-professional-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 Professional skills are the abilities that let you do a job well: technical skills plus how you work with others and conduct yourself. The four types explained. ## Key facts - Title: How to Define Professional Skills (and Which Ones You Need) - Category: Soft Skills at Work - Primary skill: Professional Behaviors - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: define professional skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/define-professional-skills/ ## What this page covers - Professional skills are the abilities that let you do a job well: technical skills plus how you work with others and conduct yourself. The four types explained. - Practical guidance for define professional skills - How this topic connects to Professional Behaviors ## Detailed explanation Professional skills are the abilities that let you do a job well, built through education and experience. They come in two halves: the technical skills a particular role requires, and the workplace skills of working with others and managing yourself, such as communicating clearly, collaborating and conducting yourself professionally. Employers expect both. If the phrase keeps turning up in job ads and course outlines, the natural question is whether your degree already covers it. The technical half usually shows on a transcript. The other half rarely does, and it is the half employers find hardest to supply themselves. Once you can define professional skills precisely, it becomes much easier to see which parts you already have and which you still need to build. ## What professional skills actually mean The University of Nottingham describes professional skills as the abilities that come from education and experience and help people perform their roles. That definition is deliberately open. Professional skills are not a fixed list; they are whatever combination of abilities a given role calls for, gathered through study, placements and work. The practical consequence is easy to miss: a degree supplies part of the set, and the rest is built on the job. The term is also used in two senses, and mixing them up causes most of the confusion around it. In the broad sense, professional skills means the whole toolkit, technical and interpersonal, that makes you effective in a role. In the narrow sense, it means professional conduct: how reliably and respectfully you behave at work. Someone who hears only the broad sense can assume their studies have it covered, when the conduct-and-people half usually has to be learned deliberately once work begins. Within that broad toolkit, four overlapping types do most of the work. ## The four types of professional skills ### Hard (technical) skills Hard skills are job-specific abilities you learn and can demonstrate: using particular software, speaking a foreign language, operating a machine, running an analysis. Because they are concrete, they can be tested, certified and listed on a resume. They are also comparatively easy for an employer to train and to verify. For most students and graduates, this is the visible half of their professional skills, the part a degree or course already documents. ### People and self-management skills These are the skills that govern how you work with other people and how you manage yourself at work, often called soft skills: listening attentively, working well in a group, speaking clearly, staying steady when a task goes wrong. The College Success open textbook makes the key point about them: employers are generally equipped to train a new hire in a hard skill, but abilities such as building rapport or managing conflict are much harder to train. That asymmetry explains why this half carries so much weight when an employer judges a new hire. It is the part they cannot easily add after hiring you. It is also learnable. These are behaviors, not personality traits, and they improve with [deliberate practice](/knowledge/improve-skills/develop-new-skills/). ### Transferable skills Transferable skills are defined by portability rather than content: they are the abilities you can carry from one job, field or industry to the next. The label overlaps heavily with people and self-management skills, and the two are sometimes used interchangeably. The University of Toronto's Teaching Assistants' Training Program notes that most [broad transferable skills](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/transferable-skills-for-jobs/) are acquired through a combination of academics, professional work and co-curricular activities. That is good news if your work history is short. Coursework, a student job and a role in a club are all places where you have already been building professional skills, even if nobody named them that way. The task is to recognize them and put them into words. ### Professionalism Professionalism is the narrow sense of the word. In NACE's [career readiness framework](/knowledge/employability/career-readiness-skills/), Professionalism covers accountability, punctuality, productive collaboration and integrity. It concerns conduct and reliability rather than expertise: keeping your commitments, being on time, treating colleagues fairly, being someone others can count on. Much of it runs on [rules nobody writes down](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/office-etiquette/), which is what makes the first professional job feel so uncertain. > I didn't always know what was considered appropriate, and sometimes I was told that I wasn't behaving in quite the way people expected. > > It was often about very small things: when it was OK to approach a colleague with a question, when you should wait, how much you should interrupt, or when something was important enough to take to your manager. > > I understood that there were unwritten rules about these things — don't interrupt unnecessarily in meetings, don't constantly pull your manager away from what they are doing, and be mindful of other people's time. > > The difficulty was that nobody had given me a handbook for any of it. I knew the informal rules existed, but I didn't yet understand what they were, where the boundaries were, or the spirit behind them. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, looking back on his first professional job. The rules he describes are real, but they are not secret. They can be observed, asked about and practiced, which is exactly how this part of professional skills gets learned. ## Which professional skills employers weigh most NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, defines career readiness through eight competencies, developed by a task force of higher-education and corporate representatives. They include Communication, Teamwork and Professionalism, alongside Technology and Career & Self-Development, and NACE deliberately chose transferable competencies over hard skills specific to any one occupation. The organizations that sit between education and employment, in other words, define readiness largely by the non-technical side of professional skills. That does not make technical skills unimportant. They are often what gets you considered for a role in the first place. But they change from job to job, while the people-and-conduct side travels with you into every role you will hold. ## How to define professional skills for yourself A definition becomes useful once you apply it to your own record. Split your professional skills into the two halves. The technical half is usually easy to list, because your courses, certificates and tools already name it. The people-and-conduct half needs evidence instead of labels: a specific situation where you kept a group project on track, explained something complex to someone outside your field, or delivered on a commitment when it was inconvenient. Where you can name a clear example, you have a strength you can describe in an application or an interview. Where you cannot, you have found a gap, and gaps in this half close through practice rather than talent. A transcript will never show you that second half, which is why it can help to [see the half your transcript misses](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) with the free Job Skills Test before you decide what to work on. ## The skills behind working like a professional Look back across the four types and one thing stands out. The technical skills shift with every role. What stays constant is how you conduct yourself, how you get your point across, and how you work alongside other people. **Professional Behaviors** is the narrow meaning of "professional" made concrete. It shows in treating everyone with the same respect, being on time, handling confidential information carefully, following workplace policies without complaint, and steering clear of passive, arrogant or negative behavior. None of this depends on personality. Each is a behavior you can notice and practice, which turns professional conduct from a vague polish into something you can deliberately build. **Communication** is the professional skill you use for most of the working day. It shows in an email that states the main point first, in choosing a conversation over a message when a topic is sensitive, in listening fully before you answer, and in speaking up in a meeting when you have something useful to add. Each of these is a habit with clear parts, so you can practice them one at a time. **Teamwork** works differently at work than in a group assignment, because the team shares a purpose that outlasts any single task. It means doing what you committed to so others can rely on you, sharing what you know freely, disagreeing on the topic without making it personal, and backing a team decision once it is made, even when you argued for a different one. The **free Job Skills Test** looks at behaviors like these, covering all three and **nine more work skills**, so you can [find out which need practice](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) instead of guessing. Every one of them can be learned, and a lower score simply points to where your effort will pay off first. Some of this probably already shows in how you work. If you have ever reread an email to a lecturer so the point came in the first line, or quietly taken on a teammate's task so a shared deadline held, you have practiced professional skills that never appear on a transcript. The ones you have not built yet are behaviors rather than fixed traits, so you can grow into them and still work in your own way. As your responsibilities grow, more of how you are judged tends to rest on this side of the toolkit, and every part of it can be practiced from where you are today. What is missing is a clear picture of your starting point. ## See where your professional skills stand The only step left is to find out. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it rates you across all twelve and shows which ones would make the biggest difference as you move into 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? Professional skills are the abilities that let you do a job well: technical skills plus how you work with others and conduct yourself. The four types explained. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Professional Behaviors. It also relates to Communication, 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/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.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/define-professional-skills/ Preferred summary: "Professional skills are the abilities that let you do a job well: technical skills plus how you work with others and conduct yourself. The four types explained." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.