# Professional Skills: What They Are and the Six That Matter Most Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/professional-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/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 how you work with others and manage your own work. Here are the six employers weigh most, and how to start building each one. ## Key facts - Title: Professional Skills: What They Are and the Six That Matter Most - Category: Soft Skills at Work - Primary skill: Professional Behaviors - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: professional skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/professional-skills/ ## What this page covers - Professional skills are how you work with others and manage your own work. Here are the six employers weigh most, and how to start building each one. - Practical guidance for professional skills - How this topic connects to Professional Behaviors ## Detailed explanation Professional skills are the nontechnical skills that decide how you work with other people and how you manage your own work: communicating clearly, working in a team, behaving in ways colleagues can rely on, managing your time, making sound decisions and taking initiative. Unlike technical skills, they apply in almost every job. If you are finishing your studies or new in your first job, you have probably met the phrase in job ads and feedback forms without anyone explaining what it asks of you. The expectations behind it are real, though mostly unwritten, and every one of them can be learned. They also count for more than a transcript would suggest. ## What counts as a professional skill The dividing line between professional and technical skills is scope. Technical skills belong to a field: coding in software, budgeting in finance, patient care in healthcare. Professional skills go wherever you go. How you write an email, handle a disagreement or plan your week matters in any role and at any employer, and it still matters if you change direction later. That is why time spent on them keeps paying off, whatever your career turns into. You will see the same skills under other labels, soft skills and employability skills among them, and job ads use the terms loosely, so two ads can ask for the same thing in different words. Underneath the labels, the substance stays the same: how you deal with other people, and how you manage yourself at work. How much these skills count is easy to underestimate when your education has been measured in grades. A 2013 European Commission study, The Employability of Higher Education Graduates: The Employers' Perspective, had employers in nine countries evaluate candidate profiles rather than rate skills in the abstract, so the results reflect trade-offs between candidates rather than wish lists. Subject expertise came out as the most important factor, but interpersonal skills such as communication and teamwork were almost as important, and general academic skills ranked below both. Put simply, what you know still comes first, but how you work with others is weighed almost as closely. The encouraging part is that these skills can be learned, and every student job, internship or group project is a place to practice them. ## Six professional skills employers look for The exact order shifts with who is asked, but the core is consistent. In a survey of 50 organizations in New England, published in the journal Education + Training, employers rated interpersonal skills as most important, followed by critical thinking and problem-solving, listening, oral communication, professionalism and personal motivation. A 2024 study of what 50 recruiters expect from graduates named teamwork, communication, management of time and resources, and critical thinking among the competencies they value. The six skills below cover that core, each described as the behavior an employer actually sees. ### 1. Communication, starting with listening Communication belongs to the interpersonal skills employers weigh almost as heavily as expertise, and one detail from the New England survey is worth taking seriously: listening ranked above oral communication. Employers value the receptive side of communication at least as much as the expressive side. At work, listening means giving people your full attention, checking that you have understood before you respond, and asking rather than guessing. The expressive side comes down to a few habits: put the main point first, keep it brief, and choose a conversation over a long message when the topic is sensitive or complicated. Written channels have their own etiquette, and very little of it is ever written down. > I had to find my own way of communicating — the professional way to communicate by email, including the internal communication systems, like chat. There's a big social aspect to it that can be hidden. That is what one of the young people we interviewed about starting work wished she had known more about before she started; the wording comes from our notes of the conversation rather than a recording. The social side includes things like how fast a reply is expected, when a chat message will do and when something needs an email, and who belongs on the recipient list. To build the skill before you have a job, practice summarizing a group project in three sentences with the conclusion first. It is the same move a [good email](/knowledge/communication/examples-of-email-etiquette/) to a manager requires. ### 2. Teamwork Teamwork has an advantage over the rest of this list. In NACE's data on career readiness, it is the competency where new graduates' view of their own proficiency and employers' view are most in line, so the group work behind you already counts as a foundation. What employers mean by teamwork is less about being agreeable than about being reliable: delivering your part when you said you would, sharing what you know instead of guarding it, giving credit to the group, and raising a disagreement about the work openly, then committing to the decision once it is made. To show it, pick a result that depended on you and be precise about which part was yours. ### 3. Professionalism Professionalism made the New England employers' top six, and it is the entry on this list most likely to arrive without a definition. In practice it is a set of everyday behaviors: being on time, treating everyone with the same respect whatever their role, showing real interest in other people's work, saying thank you, handling confidential information with care, and talking about colleagues as if they were in the room. It also comes with traps that anyone can fall into under pressure, such as going quiet and passive in meetings, complaining about every change, or acting as if you already know better. Because so much of it is unwritten, the fastest way to learn it is to watch how respected colleagues behave and to ask about the norms you cannot see. A part-time job held over several years, where turning up and treating customers well was the whole point, is good evidence that you already have the basics. ### 4. Time management The 2024 recruiter study listed the management of time and resources among the competencies employers value in graduates. Behind it sits the question a manager is really asking about a new hire: can this person be trusted to organize their own workload? The habits that earn a yes are concrete. When you take on a task, clarify exactly what is wanted, when it is due (ASAP is not a date), and what a good result looks like. Keep one list of everything you have committed to, break big tasks into smaller steps, and give your time to what is important rather than to whatever is loudest. Check in early with the person who asked, so a misunderstanding costs an hour instead of a week. In education, deadlines are set and policed for you; at work, managing them is part of the job you were hired to do. ### 5. Judgment and decision-making Employers usually call this critical thinking or problem-solving: it came second in the New England survey and appears again in the 2024 recruiter study. For someone new, it shows up less as brilliant analysis than as sound everyday decisions. That starts with knowing which calls are yours to make and which belong to your manager. Within your own area, it means getting a second opinion from someone experienced before a decision that matters, slowing down when you feel rushed or upset, accepting a good-enough answer when perfect is not needed, and noticing when you are only looking for information that confirms what you already think. A decision from a project or a part-time job, with your reasoning and what you would do differently now, is the kind of evidence an interviewer can work with. ### 6. Initiative Personal motivation rounds out the New England employers' top six, and it raises an obvious problem: nobody can see motivation directly. What they can see is initiative. For a newcomer, that means being willing to ask for things, since a no costs you little, and volunteering for the work that shapes what happens next, such as drafting the first version of a plan, organizing the next meeting, or following up on an action everyone agreed to and nobody owned. It also means seeing things through after the first burst of energy has passed. Start small while you are still learning how the place works. Your evidence is anything that exists because you started it, from a study group to a fix you suggested at a part-time job and then carried out. ## How to find your own gaps Knowing the list is the easy part. Knowing where you stand on it is harder, because your own impression is an unreliable guide. NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, has found that new graduates rate their own proficiency in [career-readiness competencies](/knowledge/employability/career-readiness-competencies/) higher than employers rate it. The gap matters because it is the employer's view that decides who gets hired and how your first months are judged. The way around it is to swap a general impression for specific evidence. Go through the six skills and, for each one, try to name a recent situation where you used it and what came of it. A skill with no example yet is something to practice, not a verdict on who you are. Then take the list to someone who has seen your work, such as a supervisor, a teacher or a teammate, and ask one precise question: which of these should I work on first? A structured self-assessment cannot replace that conversation, but it can sharpen it. Getting [a skill-by-skill picture](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) first tells you where to ask for feedback, instead of leaving you to guess. ## Building professional skills before you have much experience You do not need a job title to practice any of the six. A student job, an internship, a volunteer role or a group project offers daily chances: the email to a professor that gets you the answer you needed, the shift you handed over so cleanly that nobody had to call you, the group decision you helped land. Choose one skill at a time, take one behavior from its entry above, and practice it on purpose for a few weeks, until it no longer takes effort. Then turn practice into something an employer can see. "Good communicator" on a [résumé](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/how-to-list-soft-skills-on-resume/) gives a recruiter nothing to ask about; "wrote the handover notes our café team still uses" gives them a whole conversation. For each skill, keep a short note of one situation: what was at stake, what you did, and what changed because of it. Those notes become the lines on your résumé and your answers when an [interviewer asks you to describe](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/soft-skills-interview-questions/) a time you did something. ## The skills that make the rest of the list visible Look back at what the six entries kept returning to: how you treat people, how you get your point across, and how you pull your weight alongside others. Those threads run through almost every entry, and each of them has a name. **Professional Behaviors** is the unwritten code made explicit. It covers the respect, humility and genuine interest colleagues read in how you treat them, along with small signals of reliability such as punctuality and discretion. Understanding the attitudes behind these behaviors matters more than memorizing rules, because it lets you judge situations no rulebook covers. It also names the traps, such as passive, negative or arrogant behavior, that anyone can slide into under stress, which makes them easier to catch in yourself. **Communication** is how the rest of your skills become visible to others. Colleagues judge reliability and competence largely through how you talk, write and listen, so a few habits go a long way: lead with the main point, keep it clear and brief, listen to understand before you answer, and speak up in meetings instead of waiting to be asked. None of this depends on a gift for words; each habit can be practiced in the next email you send. **Teamwork** is what turns a capable individual into a colleague people want on their project. It rests on being excellent at your own part while asking where the team needs you, sharing knowledge and credit, and doing what you said you would. It also includes disagreeing about the work rather than the person, committing to the group's decision once it is made, and raising it respectfully and promptly when someone's commitment slips. The **free Job Skills Test** shows which of these three you can already lead with and which needs attention first, and it measures them as part of a wider set of **twelve** work skills, so you can [find your strongest starting point](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before your next application or your first week. Whatever it shows, every one of them responds to practice. ## What you may already be doing Parts of this may already sound like how you work. If you have ever been the person in a group project who sent a short note after each meeting saying who would do what by when, you practiced communication, teamwork and professional behavior in a single message. None of these skills is fixed where it stands today. Building them means changing a few habits, not who you are, and you decide which habit comes first. The more your work depends on other people, and that number grows with every step, the more these skills set the tone for how your work is received. So it pays to start with the ones that will make the biggest difference for you, and to find out which those are. ## Start with a clear picture The only thing left is to see your starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of twelve work skills, including the ones behind all six professional skills in this article. In 7 minutes, you get a profile of your strengths across all twelve and a clear view of which skills to build first for the jobs you are aiming at. **[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 how you work with others and manage your own work. Here are the six employers weigh most, and how to start building each one. ### 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/professional-skills/ Preferred summary: "Professional skills are how you work with others and manage your own work. Here are the six employers weigh most, and how to start building each one." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.