# List of Career Skills: The Core Every Job Draws On, and How to Make It Yours Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/list-of-career-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/list-of-career-skills.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 A list of career skills in two parts: twelve core skills every career draws on, plus the hard skills of your role. Here's how to find which ones you can show. ## Key facts - Title: List of Career Skills: The Core Every Job Draws On, and How to Make It Yours - Category: Soft Skills at Work - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: list of career skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/list-of-career-skills/ ## What this page covers - A list of career skills in two parts: twelve core skills every career draws on, plus the hard skills of your role. Here's how to find which ones you can show. - Practical guidance for list of career skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation A practical list of career skills has two parts. The first is a core that every career draws on: self-awareness, goal-setting, confidence, resilience, professional behavior, communication, teamwork, working with your manager, time management, decision-making, networking and influence. The second is the hard skills of the specific role you want. If you are about to graduate, or a year into your first job, the names are rarely what holds you back. The harder part is telling which of these skills you can already show an employer, and which ones deserve your effort first. That starts with seeing how the skills on the list differ from one another. ## The three kinds of skills behind any list of career skills Nearly any skill you could [put on a resume](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/career-skills-resume/) belongs to one of three groups: hard skills, soft skills or transferable skills. Each group tells you something different about where a skill applies, and how far it will travel with you. ### Hard skills Hard skills are concrete, job-specific abilities that you learn and can often measure: working in a particular software package, speaking a foreign language, operating a machine. Each one is tied to a task, a tool or a field, and most are taught through a degree, a course or training on the job. That tie to a field is exactly what keeps hard skills off any universal list. The hard skills a lab technician needs and the ones a marketing assistant needs barely overlap, so the reliable place to find yours is the role you are aiming for: its job ad, its stated requirements, the tools its team works with. Put them on your list when they match that role, and keep the rest in reserve. ### Soft skills Soft skills are the nontechnical skills that govern how you work with other people and how you manage yourself at work. They are not bound to any tool or field, which is why they apply in every role and at every stage of a career, and why they make up most of a list that holds across careers. The core list we work with has twelve, in three groups. Self-regulatory skills, for managing yourself: - Building Self-Awareness: knowing what you are genuinely good at, not just competent at, and using feedback to see what you cannot see alone. - Setting Goals: working out which kind of work fits your strengths and values, with plans that look months ahead rather than decades. - Building Confidence: acting before you feel ready, and building belief through small steps you practice. - Building Resilience: recovering from setbacks by putting your energy into what you can control. Basic work skills, the ones every working day runs on: - Professional Behaviors: the unwritten norms, from being on time to speaking about colleagues as if they were in the room. - Communication: getting your main point across first, in conversation, email and meetings, and listening as carefully as you speak. - Teamwork: putting the team's goal ahead of your own, doing what you commit to, and disagreeing without making it personal. - Working with Your Manager: treating the relationship as a partnership, with regular one-on-ones and expectations agreed out loud. - Time Management: clarifying what a task actually requires before you say yes, prioritizing, and saying no when you need to. - Decision-Making: knowing how far your authority goes, asking for a second opinion, and avoiding traps such as sticking with a choice because of what you have already put into it. Proactive skills, for moving your career forward: - Networking: building relationships before you need them, mainly by being useful to people. - Getting and Applying Influence: earning credibility, taking initiative, and winning support for ideas without formal authority. None of these depends on personality. Each is a set of behaviors that can be learned and practiced, and you stay yourself while you learn them. What makes them easy to underestimate is that they are rarely taught directly. Most people pick them up by trial and error, in a student job or an internship, one awkward moment at a time. If you have ever sat over an [email to someone senior](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/how-to-write-email-to-senior-management-sample/), unsure what tone to strike, you are in better company than it feels. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work told us about her first months as an intern: > For quite a while, I felt like I was mostly taking minutes or doing things like preparing invitations for seminars. But even those tasks could be difficult, because I had never actually been taught how to do them. > > There were all sorts of situations where I found it embarrassing that I had to keep asking for help, because I felt like these were things I should already know. > > But I hadn't been taught how to write a formal email, or how to invite a well-known professor or a government official to a meeting with a VIP person. How do you phrase something like that in the right way? What tone do you use? What is considered appropriate? > > Those things may seem simple once you know how to do them, but when you are new, they really aren't. Later in the same internship she was co-writing reports and putting her expertise to work. What she lacked at the start was not knowledge from her degree but the layer of everyday skills around it, and that layer can be learned like anything else. ### Transferable skills Transferable skills are defined by where they can go rather than by what they are: any ability you can carry from one job, field or setting into another. Every soft skill on the list above is transferable. So are some hard skills, such as project management, data analysis or technical writing, because they describe a way of working rather than one employer's tools. This is the group that matters most when you have [little formal work experience](/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-and-experience/), because it lets what you did in your studies, a part-time job or volunteering count in a new role. Keeping a weekend shift running smoothly while studying for exams is time management. Steering a group project to its deadline is teamwork. The skill is the same; only the setting has changed. Because the three labels overlap, one skill can sit in two of them at once. Every soft skill is transferable, while a hard skill transfers only when it is not bound to one tool or one field. So the useful question for each skill on your list is not which column it belongs in, but whether it will move with you to the next job. ## Turning the list into your own The categories give your list a structure with two parts: the core of skills that every career draws on, and the role-specific hard skills you take from the job in question. Keep the two apart. Mixed into one list, they either grow too long to act on or crowd out the technical requirements of the role you actually want. The next step is evidence, because employers do not take a skill on trust. According to NACE's Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update, employers want to see that candidates can work in a team, solve problems and communicate effectively, and NACE's president and CEO stressed that candidates should show examples of these skills rather than simply list them. Writing a skill down costs nothing, so what persuades is a situation in which you used it. For each skill on your list, that means one concrete moment: what was happening, what you did, and what came of it. That moment is what goes into a cover letter or an [interview answer](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/interpersonal-skills-interview/). Finding those moments takes a deliberate inventory, and it works best before you write anything down. NC Careers' Identify Your Skills activity, for example, has you sort skills into hard skills on one side and transferable or soft skills on the other, and identify your own in each before anything else. The order matters because people routinely overlook skills they have used without ever naming them. Go through the core list one skill at a time and ask where you have actually done it. Some skills will come with an obvious example. Others will leave you with nothing, or with an example you are not sure counts. Those gaps are not a verdict: each one is a behavior you have not practiced yet, and practicing it is open to you. Start with one or two, chosen where the role you want leans hardest and your evidence is thinnest, rather than trying to fix the whole list at once. One caution about the inventory itself is that it only finds what you happen to remember. A structured check, [scoring yourself on all twelve](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), fills in what recall misses and makes those first one or two easier to pick. ## What it takes to use the list well Making the list your own asks three things of you: an honest read of where you stand, examples you can put into words, and evidence that mostly comes from working alongside other people. Each of those leans on a particular skill from the list. **Building Self-Awareness** is what makes a list personal. It starts with separating what you are genuinely good at from what you can merely get done, by noticing how you go about a task, how it leaves you feeling and what results it brings. Then it adds the view you cannot get alone: feedback from a manager, a professor or a colleague, asked for specifically and used to find your blind spots. A gap found this way is simply something you have not learned yet. **Communication** is the skill through which an employer sees all the others, because every example you offer arrives as an email, an interview answer or a conversation. Behind the label sit concrete habits: stating your main point first, keeping it brief, writing emails a busy reader can act on, listening fully, and speaking up in meetings when you have something useful to add. Each habit can be practiced on its own, in the next message you write, which is how a word on a resume becomes something colleagues actually notice. **Teamwork** is where much of your evidence will come from, since most early-career work is done with other people. The substance behind "team player" is specific: putting the team's goal ahead of your own agenda, doing what you said you would, sharing what you know and the credit for what you achieved together, and disagreeing about the work without making it personal. It is not the same as being agreeable. A team also needs your honest view, and sometimes it needs you to hold a teammate to a commitment. All three come from **the same list as the other nine**, and the **free Job Skills Test** measures every one of them. It shows which of these three is already strong enough to [lead your applications with](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and which one to start practicing in your next email or team meeting, because each is a set of habits rather than a fixed trait. Chances are a few of these skills already run through your week without a label on them. If you have ever been the one in a group chat who turned a vague plan into a time, a place and a name next to each task, that was teamwork and communication at work, whether or not you called it that. The skills you cannot point to yet are not missing pieces of who you are. They are the next ones to practice, and you get to choose the order, starting with the one or two that matter most for the job you want next. Left unnamed, gaps like these tend to show more as your responsibilities widen; named early, each one becomes a small, specific thing to work on. ## Start your own list of career skills Turning the list into your own takes one honest snapshot of where you stand today. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it scores you on all twelve skills from the list above and shows which ones would make the biggest difference to your next application and your first years at work. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes 7 minutes, and your results appear 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? A list of career skills in two parts: twelve core skills every career draws on, plus the hard skills of your role. Here's how to find which ones you can show. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. 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/self-awareness.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/list-of-career-skills/ Preferred summary: "A list of career skills in two parts: twelve core skills every career draws on, plus the hard skills of your role. Here's how to find which ones you can show." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.