# Personal and Professional Skills: What They Are and Which You Have Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/personal-and-professional-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/personal-and-professional-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 Personal skills are how you manage yourself; professional skills are what you can do in a role. See examples, what employers weigh, and how to build both. ## Key facts - Title: Personal and Professional Skills: What They Are and Which You Have - Category: Soft Skills at Work - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Professional Behaviors, Communication - Primary keyword: personal and professional skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/personal-and-professional-skills/ ## What this page covers - Personal skills are how you manage yourself; professional skills are what you can do in a role. See examples, what employers weigh, and how to build both. - Practical guidance for personal and professional skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation Personal and professional skills split what you bring to work into two halves. Personal skills are how you manage yourself and relate to others: taking feedback, handling nerves and setbacks, treating colleagues well. Professional skills are what you can do in a role, from your field's technical know-how to communicating, collaborating and delivering. Most jobs need both. The labels turn up in course modules, résumé templates and appraisal forms, usually with no explanation of what belongs where, and it is easy to end up with a long list of adjectives and no idea which ones describe you. The more useful question is not which column a skill sits in. It is which skills you already have, which you lack, and how anyone would know. ## What is the difference between personal and professional skills? Personal skills describe how you are at work. They cover the way you manage yourself, such as how you [react to criticism](/knowledge/self-awareness/handle-criticism/), how you recover after a setback and how well you know your own strengths, and the way you deal with the people around you. Professional skills describe what you can deliver: the abilities you have built through education, work and experience, including the technical skills of your field. The two halves answer different questions. Personal skills answer "How do I behave at work?" Professional skills answer "What can I deliver?" A degree goes some way toward the second question and rarely touches the first, which is why so many people start their first job with the personal side largely untrained. They are not separate packages, though. Personal skills keep you steady and easy to work with; professional skills make sure the work itself gets done well. Someone strong on one side and weak on the other is held back by the weaker side: the capable person nobody enjoys working with, or the pleasant colleague who cannot deliver. Being good at the tasks does not make up for drifting away from the people around you. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work watched it happen to himself: > I think I became so focused on getting the work done and making sure everything kept moving that I gradually separated myself from the rest of the team. > > I was constantly thinking about the next task and what needed to be delivered, rather than paying attention to the relationships around me. Looking back, I think that made it much harder for me to really become part of the group. > > I regret that now, because eventually work became so much about pushing through and getting things done that I neglected the human relationships that are also essential to making a workplace function well. > > That is something I really want to learn from. I don't want to end up being the person who sits alone in a corner, focused only on the work, and eventually burns out. What he describes can be corrected, and that is the encouraging part: both halves are made of behaviors you can learn, not a personality you are stuck with. ## What are examples of personal skills? LSE's careers guidance gives patience, listening, self-motivation, staying calm in a crisis and resilience as examples, and makes the point that skills like these are what build relationships with peers and let you get on with co-workers. That is where personal skills show: not on paper, but in the daily give-and-take with the people you work with. In the framework we use, the personal side comes down to four skills, all about managing yourself: - Building self-awareness: knowing what you are genuinely good at, and taking feedback without either crumbling or brushing it off. - Setting goals: working out what kind of work [fits your strengths](/knowledge/setting-goals/play-to-your-strengths/) and values, rather than following a plan someone else wrote for you. - Building confidence: acting before you feel ready, and becoming more capable each time you do. - Building resilience: recovering from mistakes, criticism and plans that fall through, by putting your energy into what you can control. ## What are examples of professional skills? Professional skills have two layers. The first is technical: the methods, tools and knowledge of your particular field, which differ from one profession to the next. The second is the set of working skills almost every role relies on. LSE's guidance names communication and teamwork as skills needed in nearly all roles, next to the hard skills that depend on the profession. In the framework we use, that working layer holds eight skills: - Professional behaviors: the conduct and etiquette colleagues read you by, from punctuality to how you speak about people who are not in the room. - Communication: listening properly, writing clear emails, speaking up in meetings. - Teamwork: putting the shared goal first, doing what you committed to, disagreeing without making it personal. - Working with your manager: aligning on expectations and making your results visible. - Time management: prioritizing, saying yes and no well, protecting your time off. - Decision-making: knowing what you are allowed to decide, and avoiding the common traps. - Networking: building relationships before you need them. - Getting and applying influence: earning credibility and winning support for your ideas without formal authority. The technical layer is what a transcript tends to show. The working layer rarely appears anywhere on paper, which is exactly why it deserves deliberate attention. ## Are soft skills the same as personal skills? Partly. Soft skills cover everything nontechnical: the personal side plus the working layer of the professional side. The only thing they leave out is the technical know-how of a specific field. The labels overlap because they describe the same behavior from two angles, the person and the role. Communication, teamwork and self-management can be filed under either heading, and so can organizing your time or handling stress. In engineering, "professional skills" usually means the people side of the job: a 2025 work-in-progress paper for the American Society for Engineering Education, based on a survey of 37 employers, uses the term for interpersonal abilities that strengthen collaboration, build working relationships and complement technical expertise. The practical answer is to use whichever label your course, your résumé template or the job ad uses, and to put your attention on the behaviors underneath. Those stay the same whatever the heading says. ## Which skills do employers actually look for? Above all, transferable ones. The University of Waterloo's career guidance, drawing on NACE research, notes that the competencies employers most want from graduates are [transferable skills](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/transferable-skills-for-jobs/) such as communication and interpersonal skills, rather than skills tied to one specific job. The reason is portability: a transferable skill keeps its value when the project, the team or the employer changes, which makes it a safer bet for someone hiring a person with little track record. That changes how to read your own profile. Your degree shows an employer that you can learn the technical side. The personal and professional skills around it are a core part of what they are hiring, not a pleasant extra on top of the qualification. ## How do I know which personal and professional skills I have? Start with evidence rather than adjectives. Pick situations from the last year or two, such as a group project, a part-time job, an internship or a club you helped run, and ask what you actually did, how it felt and what came of it. Tasks that went well and left you energized point to genuine strengths. Tasks you handled but found draining point to things you are merely competent at. The difference matters, because strengths are what you build on, while competences are simply what you can manage. Then ask other people. A tutor, a manager or a colleague can see habits you cannot, especially the ones that show up under pressure. Ask for something specific and forward-looking: "What one thing should I do differently on the next project?" gets a far more useful answer than "Any feedback?" Finally, check yourself against a defined set of skills rather than a loose list of virtues. A vague list makes it easy to tick every box and learn nothing; a clear set makes the gaps visible. If you suspect your picture of yourself is either too generous or too harsh, the free Job Skills Test lets you [rate yourself skill by skill](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) across the whole map above, so you start from an honest baseline instead of a guess. ## How can I develop my personal and professional skills? By practicing behaviors, not by trying to change your personality. These skills are learnable: a gap is something you have not learned yet, not a flaw in your character. Most of them are also the unwritten part of working life. Nobody hands you a manual on how to disagree with a teammate, how to keep a manager informed or when to turn down an extra task, so most people pick these things up by trial and error, slowly, and some never quite do. Deliberate practice is faster: 1. Pick one skill at a time, ideally one where a small improvement would make a visible difference in your current job, internship or studies. 2. Turn it into a concrete behavior. "Communicate better" is not something you can practice; "state my main point in the first line of every email" is. 3. Practice it in real situations, starting with lower-stakes ones and stepping up as it gets easier. 4. Ask someone who sees you work whether they notice a difference, and adjust. You do not need a formal course to start. A student job, an internship or a group project offers daily practice in nearly every skill on the map. ## How do I show personal and professional skills on a résumé? Match them to the role, and prove each one. The job description tells you which skills matter for that position, so let it decide which ones you highlight rather than listing everything you can think of. The most common mistake is the bare claim. "Team player" or "excellent communicator" gives an employer nothing to check. A short example of the skill in use does: the group project where you took over the planning when a deadline slipped, or the weekly update you wrote for a busy supervisor. Every skill you name on a résumé or CV should be one you could back up with a situation like that [in an interview](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/personal-skills-interview/), which is one more reason to know honestly which ones you have. ## What makes both halves easier to build Look back across these answers and the same few things keep surfacing: knowing honestly where you stand, conducting yourself in ways other people can rely on, and getting your point across, whether in a feedback conversation, a team meeting or a two-line example on a résumé. Each of those is a skill in its own right. **Building Self-Awareness** is what turns any list of personal and professional skills into a plan. It means separating what you are genuinely good at from what you can merely get through, and using feedback from tutors, managers and colleagues to find the blind spots you cannot see on your own. Done honestly, it shrinks a long list of things you feel you should be into two or three things worth working on now, without asking you to become someone else. **Professional Behaviors** is the part of professional skills that is about conduct rather than technique: treating everyone with the same respect, being on time, showing appreciation, staying open to change, and steering clear of the passive, arrogant or negative habits that quietly cost people goodwill. None of it asks you to be stiff or to hide who you are. Common sense is not common practice, though, and because these norms are rarely spelled out, it pays to make them deliberate: each one is a behavior you can notice and practice. **Communication** sits on the seam between the two halves. How you listen and respond to people is personal; how you write an email, contribute in a meeting or explain your work is professional. It is also one of the clearest signs that these skills are learned rather than inborn: stating your main point first, listening to understand rather than to reply, and adjusting to the person in front of you are habits anyone can practice, starting with the next message they send. Of the three, self-awareness is the one that unlocks the others, and it is the hardest to do from the inside. The **free Job Skills Test** gives it some outside structure: it covers these three alongside everything else on the map earlier in this article, so you can [spot which skill to work on first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and put your practice where it will show soonest. Every skill it measures can be trained, so whatever it turns up is a starting point rather than a verdict. Parts of that map may already describe you. Perhaps you are the one in a group project who notices when a teammate has gone quiet, or the one whose share of the work arrives a day early. Those are working skills in action, even if no résumé template has a box for them. The gaps sit right beside them on the same map, and they close the same way the strengths were built: through practice, while you stay recognizably yourself. They also tend to weigh more with each step up in responsibility, which makes now, while the stakes are still modest, a good moment to start on the ones that matter most for you. ## Find out where your personal and professional skills stand Seeing the map is the easy part; placing yourself on it is what makes the rest useful. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills that takes 7 minutes. It shows where you stand on all twelve skills from the map above, personal and professional alike, and which of them would make the biggest difference for you right now. ## 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? Personal skills are how you manage yourself; professional skills are what you can do in a role. See examples, what employers weigh, and how to build both. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Professional Behaviors, Communication. ### 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/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.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/personal-and-professional-skills/ Preferred summary: "Personal skills are how you manage yourself; professional skills are what you can do in a role. See examples, what employers weigh, and how to build both." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.