# Types of Career Skills: What Sets Them Apart and Where Yours Fit Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/types-of-career-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/types-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 There are three main types of career skills: hard, soft, and transferable. See what sets each apart, what employers weigh, and how to name the skills you have. ## Key facts - Title: Types of Career Skills: What Sets Them Apart and Where Yours Fit - Category: Soft Skills at Work - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: types of career skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/types-of-career-skills/ ## What this page covers - There are three main types of career skills: hard, soft, and transferable. See what sets each apart, what employers weigh, and how to name the skills you have. - Practical guidance for types of career skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation There are three main types of career skills. Hard skills are the job-specific, technical abilities of a field, such as accounting or data analysis. Soft skills govern how you work with other people and how you manage yourself at work. Transferable skills are any skills, hard or soft, that you can carry from one role into another. The labels are quick to learn. Putting your own experience under them is slower, especially when most of it comes from coursework, a part-time job, or a club you helped run, and you are not sure any of it counts. It does count, but how much depends less on which label a skill wears than on whether you can show it in action. ## The main types of career skills, and what sets each apart The three types describe the same skills from different angles. Alongside them, employers and universities use a fourth grouping of their own: named lists of competencies that spell out what being ready for work looks like. Taken together, they give you a vocabulary for everything from a lab technique to the way you run a meeting. ### Hard skills Hard skills are the technical abilities tied to a particular job or field: keeping accounts, analyzing a data set, working in specialist software, running a laboratory procedure. You pick them up through a degree, a course, formal training, or the job itself, and they are comparatively easy to measure, which is why so many of them come with an exam or a certification attached. That measurability is also why hard skills tend to dominate how students describe themselves. They are the skills a transcript records. They matter, and in a first job search they are often what gets you considered for a specific role at all. But they cover only one part of what an employer is weighing, and on their own they say little about how you will do the job alongside other people. ### Soft skills Soft skills are the nontechnical side of working life, and they come in two kinds. Some concern how you work with others: communicating clearly, collaborating in a team, building a working relationship with your manager, and the [professional behaviors](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/professionalism-in-the-workplace/) colleagues read as respect and reliability. Others concern how you manage yourself: [knowing your own strengths](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-identify-your-strengths/), building confidence by doing, and recovering when something goes wrong. They are harder to measure than hard skills, yet they matter in almost every field, because nearly all work gets done with and through other people. Whatever the technical content of a job, someone has to explain it, agree on it, and deliver it on time. Employers are also generally better placed to train a new hire in a technical procedure than in handling a disagreement or a demanding client, so these skills weigh heavily in hiring, and they count for even more as a career moves on. If your education assessed mostly what you knew rather than how you worked with people, you may have had little feedback on this side and may be underrating it. That is a gap in information, not in ability. Soft skills are learnable behaviors, not personality traits, and you can build them while staying entirely yourself. ### Transferable skills Transferable skills are not a third pile next to the other two. What defines them is portability: a transferable skill is one you can take from one role, field, or setting into another. Communication is the obvious soft example. Project management, data analysis, and technical writing are hard skills that move just as easily between employers and industries. For a career starter, this is the most encouraging of the types. Skills you built in coursework, a part-time job, or volunteering count toward a first job, provided you can show how they carry over. The difficulty is rarely having transferable skills; it is translating them. If that is the step where you stall, the question is a fair one. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work asked it outright: > I can solve a school assignment, do my research, structure a paper. But how do I turn 'searching literature for an exam' into something a workplace can use? Nobody on the degree tells us which jobs we can actually hold, or how academic skills become a work resource. Her question has a practical answer: describe the skill by what it does for someone else at work. Searching literature for an exam becomes finding, judging, and summarizing information so a colleague can make a decision. Structuring a paper becomes organizing complex material so a busy reader gets the main point first. Nothing about the skill changes. You are naming it for a new setting, in terms a hiring manager recognizes. ### Career readiness competencies The fourth grouping comes from the world of hiring itself. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) names eight career readiness competencies: career and self-development, communication, critical thinking, equity and inclusion, leadership, professionalism, teamwork, and technology. NACE presents them as core competencies, also called transferable skills, that employers value, and university career centers widely use the list to describe what prepares graduates for the workplace. It overlaps heavily with the soft and transferable types; communication, teamwork, and professionalism appear on it by name. What sets this grouping apart is its emphasis on proof. NACE defines career readiness as the attainment and demonstration of the competencies that prepare graduates for a successful transition into the workplace. Demonstration is the working word: a competency counts when you can show it, not when you claim it. The list is also revised over time (an earlier version named seven competencies rather than eight), so it works best as a shared vocabulary rather than a fixed rulebook. That vocabulary is its practical value for you: when you describe your experience in terms employers and career centers already use, what you bring is easier to recognize. ## Using the types of career skills to map your own Start by letting go of the idea that every skill belongs in exactly one box. The types overlap. Communication is a soft skill and a transferable one at once, and technical writing is a communication skill that sits on the hard side. Treat the types as lenses rather than drawers, and each one becomes a question you can ask of anything you have done: Is this tied to a particular field? Is it about working with others or managing myself? Would it come with me to a different job? Then narrow the map to one destination. The types describe skills in general; a job description turns them into a concrete list for a single role. Read the description of a job you want, note the skills it names, and mirror them in your résumé's [skills section](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/core-skills-resume/), each one backed by an example. The example is what turns a listed skill into a demonstrated one: a sentence you could [say in an interview](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/interpersonal-skills-interview/) about where you used the skill and what happened because you did. Where you find a skill in the job description but no example in your own history, you have found a gap, and in a learnable skill a gap is a starting point rather than a verdict. Pick the one or two the role leans on most. The catch is that the interpersonal and self-management side is the hardest to judge from the inside: it is harder to measure than anything on a transcript, and most people have had little feedback on it. Rather than relying on your own impression alone, you can [score your workplace skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and start from a measured picture instead of a guess. ## What makes your own career skills easier to see There is a small irony in mapping your career skills: the work runs on a few career skills of its own, all from the soft, transferable side. Three of them show up at almost every step above. **Building Self-Awareness** is what lets you place yourself on the map honestly. It starts with telling real strengths apart from mere competence: the tasks you work through with ease, finish with energy to spare, and do well enough that others notice are different from the ones you can simply get through. Feedback fills in what you cannot see yourself, especially when you ask someone specific what you could do differently next time. A questionnaire can open that process, but the evidence comes from real work and the people who watched you do it, and what it turns up are skills not yet learned rather than fixed limits. **Communication** is the transferable skill you can inspect most closely, because its parts are visible. Leading with the point, cutting a message down to what the reader needs, listening until the other person has finished, writing an email that needs no follow-up question, speaking up in a meeting when you have something to add: each can be practiced and observed on its own. That turns "good communicator" from a phrase on a résumé into habits you can back with a specific example. **Teamwork**. If most of your work so far was graded one person at a time, this may be the skill you find hardest to back with evidence. Its substance is concrete: doing your own part well while asking where the team needs you, earning trust by delivering what you committed to, disagreeing about the work without making it personal, and then backing the decision the team makes, even when you argued for another. None of that requires being in charge, and none of it is the same as simply being easy to get along with. Start with the **free Job Skills Test**: it scores these three as part of a wider set of **twelve work skills**, and tells you which of them is already [a strength worth leading with](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and which deserves practice first. Each one is built through practice, so the result reads as a plan rather than a grade. You may find that some of this already runs through how you work, just without a label. If you have ever rewritten the summary of a group report so the main finding came first, or quietly taken on the task nobody else had claimed, you were practicing communication and teamwork before you had a name for either. The skills you cannot point to yet are simply the next ones to practice, and you choose the order, beginning with whichever matters most for the role you want. Technical skills may get you through the first door, but as your work comes to involve more people and more judgment, the other types carry more of the load. Knowing early where yours stand lets you build them on your own schedule instead of meeting a gap at the moment it starts to cost you. ## See where your career skills stand From here, the useful move is a plain look at your own starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it scores you on all twelve and shows which are already strengths and which would make the biggest difference to your applications and your first years at 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? There are three main types of career skills: hard, soft, and transferable. See what sets each apart, what employers weigh, and how to name the skills you have. ### 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/types-of-career-skills/ Preferred summary: "There are three main types of career skills: hard, soft, and transferable. See what sets each apart, what employers weigh, and how to name the skills you have." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.