# The Skills Needed to Work, and Which Ones to Build First Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/skills-needed-to-work/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/skills-needed-to-work.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 The skills needed to work come in four layers: foundational, job-specific, workplace and transferable. See what each covers and which gaps to close first. ## Key facts - Title: The Skills Needed to Work, and Which Ones to Build First - Category: Soft Skills at Work - Primary skill: Professional Behaviors - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: skills needed to work - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/skills-needed-to-work/ ## What this page covers - The skills needed to work come in four layers: foundational, job-specific, workplace and transferable. See what each covers and which gaps to close first. - Practical guidance for skills needed to work - How this topic connects to Professional Behaviors ## Detailed explanation The skills needed to work fall into four layers: foundational skills like reading, writing, math and basic computer use; job-specific skills tied to a particular role; workplace skills such as communication, teamwork and professional behavior; and transferable skills you carry from one job to the next. Only the second layer changes much between jobs. That is worth knowing if you are about to start working and quietly wondering whether your education has covered everything. It usually covers the first two layers well. The other two are where most newcomers feel unsure, and they turn out to be the ones every job leans on. ## The four kinds of skills needed to work It helps to see the skills needed to work as layers rather than one long list. Each layer does a different job, is learned in a different way and matters at a different moment: some get you hired, others decide how your first months go. ### Foundational skills Foundational skills are the basics every other skill rests on: reading, writing, everyday math and computer literacy. They rarely appear in job ads because employers assume them, and job training is built on that assumption. Nova Scotia Community College's preparation checklist for its trades programs, for example, names basic math, reading technical manuals and computer literacy as the starting point; the training that follows takes them for granted. That makes this the layer to fix first if anything in it feels shaky. A gap here slows down everything learned on top of it, while a solid base makes the next layers faster to pick up. ### Job-specific skills Job-specific skills, often called technical skills, belong to the tasks of a particular position. The Utah Education Network gives operating a machine as an example; in another role it might be accounting software, a lab procedure or a programming language. Because these skills differ from one occupation to the next, no single list could ever cover them. The practical consequence is a relief: you do not need to master the technical layer for every possible job in advance. Check it against [the specific job description](/knowledge/types-of-skills/preferred-skills/) in front of you. Qualifications and technical ability are usually what open the door, and much of the rest is taught once you are inside. ### Workplace skills Workplace skills are the nontechnical ones: how you communicate, how you work with others, how you conduct yourself and how you manage your own work. They make up most of what employers say they expect from people starting out. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) defines [eight career readiness competencies](/knowledge/employability/career-readiness-skills/) (Career & Self-Development, Communication, Critical Thinking, Equity & Inclusion, Leadership, Professionalism, Teamwork and Technology), and only the last of them is a technical skill. What makes this layer workable is that NACE describes it in behaviors rather than qualities. Communication, in that framing, means listening actively and writing or speaking so that others can follow; teamwork includes handling conflict and working well with personalities unlike your own. A label like "good communicator" gives you nothing to practice. A behavior does. The layer also holds the basics nobody thinks of as skills at all: arriving on time, arriving prepared and doing what you said you would do. Colleagues form their first judgments of a newcomer from these things long before any real work has been assessed, so getting them right early buys you time to learn everything else. Very little of this is taught directly in education, which is why so many people pick it up by trial and error once they start. > What was hardest for me at the start was the email system, [meeting culture](/knowledge/communication/attending-meetings/), all of that. Of course we had onboarding, but when you've never been in a business environment, you have to figure out: What's my role? How do meetings and deadlines work? How do you use an email system to invite each other back and forth? And what's the culture around all of it? > > My organization took it for granted that when you came in, you just knew how things were done. It was a steep learning curve at the start. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, describing the part of his first office job that no course had prepared him for. A steep start like his is not a sign of missing talent; these are behaviors anyone can learn, and learning them deliberately is a lot gentler than learning them on the spot. ### Transferable skills Transferable skills are the skills you can take from one job to another. They overlap heavily with workplace skills, because the way you communicate, cooperate and organize your work does not change when the technical content of a job does. This is the layer that [makes your existing experience count](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/transferable-skills-for-resume/). A part-time job, a group project, a volunteer role or a student society all exercise skills a new employer can use: keeping commitments to a team, explaining a problem clearly, staying calm with an impatient customer. The work lies in translating them. Name the behavior and where you practiced it, rather than listing a job title and hoping the connection is obvious. ## Skills that get you hired vs. skills that carry you through Two questions are easy to blur. Which skills get you hired? Mostly your qualifications and the technical layer. Which skills decide how your first months go? Mostly the workplace layer. Someone who prepares only for the first question can land the job and still arrive feeling unready for the everyday part of it. A sensible order follows from that. Close any gap in the foundations first, check the technical layer against the role you are actually applying for, and give the workplace layer deliberate attention instead of leaving it to chance. These skills are learnable behaviors, not fixed traits, so the useful question is not "do I have what it takes?" but "which behaviors should I practice first?" If you would rather not guess at the answer, a short self-assessment can [show which skills to prioritize](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before your first job starts assuming them. ## The skills that make the everyday part of work easier Look back across the four layers and a pattern appears. The parts that travel with you from job to job, and that no job description fully spells out, come down to how you conduct yourself, how you talk with people and how you work alongside them. **Professional Behaviors** are the signals colleagues read before they have seen any of your work: turning up on time, treating everyone with the same respect, showing genuine interest in how things are done, and staying humble while you learn. Just as telling are the habits to steer clear of, such as constant complaining or passing on gossip. None of this asks you to become someone else; it is a short set of norms you can learn, and it tells people quickly that you are someone they can rely on. **Communication** at the start of a job is less about polished presentations than about the everyday: listening properly, asking the question instead of guessing, putting your main point first and keeping an email short enough to be read. Much of a new role is working out what other people need from you, and clear communication is how you find out fast and how you keep others informed about where your work stands. **Teamwork**. Almost everything at work is done with or for someone else, so being easy to work with matters from the first week. That means doing what you committed to, sharing what you know instead of guarding it, and disagreeing about the work without making it personal. Trust in a team is built from small, repeated acts of reliability, which also means you can build it on purpose. Each of these is something you can check before you rely on it. The **free Job Skills Test** looks at how you tend to handle situations like these and [maps your everyday work habits](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), for these three and for **the other skills they sit alongside in a set of twelve**. A weaker result is not a verdict; it simply tells you which behavior to practice next. ## Where you already stand Parts of this may already sound familiar. If you have covered a shift for a coworker who called in sick, kept a group project on schedule after someone dropped out, or explained a delay to a customer who was running out of patience, you have been using these skills, perhaps without calling them that. Those moments are the raw material. What you build from them is up to you. A gap in these skills is not a flaw in who you are; it is something you have not practiced yet, and you can practice it while staying entirely yourself. These skills also tend to carry more weight as your responsibilities grow, which makes the start of your working life a good time to look at where you stand. ## Find your starting point The only step left is to see which of your work skills are already doing their job and which deserve attention first. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills that takes 7 minutes: it shows where you stand across all twelve and points to the ones that will make the biggest difference as you start working. ## 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? The skills needed to work come in four layers: foundational, job-specific, workplace and transferable. See what each covers and which gaps to close first. ### 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/skills-needed-to-work/ Preferred summary: "The skills needed to work come in four layers: foundational, job-specific, workplace and transferable. See what each covers and which gaps to close first." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.