# Types of Work Skills: What Each Kind Covers and Where Your Experience Fits Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/types-of-work-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/types-of-work-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 Work skills split into hard and soft, with transferable skills cutting across both. See the main types of work skills, what each covers, and how to sort yours. ## Key facts - Title: Types of Work Skills: What Each Kind Covers and Where Your Experience Fits - Category: Soft Skills at Work - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: types of work skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/types-of-work-skills/ ## What this page covers - Work skills split into hard and soft, with transferable skills cutting across both. See the main types of work skills, what each covers, and how to sort yours. - Practical guidance for types of work skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation The main types of work skills are hard skills, the technical abilities tied to a particular job or field, and soft skills, which cover how you work with other people and how you manage yourself. Transferable skills cut across both: they are any skills that keep their value when you change jobs. A transcript records only the first kind. Much of what you can already do, from covering a shift at short notice to keeping a group project on schedule, falls under types nobody graded, so it is easy to overlook. Laid out side by side, the seven types below turn that overlooked experience into skills you can name. ## The main types of work skills There is no single official list. The same abilities are labeled hard or technical skills on one side and soft, core, transferable or "power" skills on the other, because each framework is built for its own purpose, whether that is comparing occupations, preparing graduates or screening candidates. One official map is O*NET, the occupational database sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, which sorts work skills into six groups: basic, complex problem solving, resource management, social, systems and technical. The seven types below combine the broad hard-and-soft split with O*NET's finer groups, so you can use whichever lens fits the experience you are sorting. ### 1. Hard skills Hard skills are the technical, job-specific abilities you usually gain through education or formal training: writing code, speaking a foreign language, analyzing a data set, operating specialist equipment. They attach to a task or a technology, which makes them comparatively easy to test, certify and list. O*NET's technical group, which covers work with machines and technological systems, with equipment maintenance as one example, is a narrower slice of the same territory. Because a degree records them, hard skills are usually the part of your inventory you can already write. They often decide whether you are considered for a specific role at all. What they say little about is how you will do that role alongside other people, and that is where the next two types come in. ### 2. Interpersonal skills Interpersonal skills govern how you work with and through other people: communicating clearly, collaborating in a team, building [a working relationship with your manager](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/relationship-with-boss/), and the professional behaviors colleagues read as respect and reliability. O*NET's social group covers the same ground, describing these as the capacities used to work with people to achieve goals, with coordination and social perceptiveness among its examples. Almost all work is delivered alongside others, so this type shapes results in every occupation, not only the people-facing ones. It is also the type school tends to train least, and the one a first job tests first. If the technical half of starting work feels manageable and the people half does not, you would not be the first to notice that split. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described it to us in these terms: > One of the things that has surprised me is just how much the difficult parts of working life can take up mentally. > > For me, a lot of those difficulties are actually social rather than purely professional. I'm thinking about things like collaborating with colleagues and communicating with clients. > > Because I'm the only relatively recent graduate in my workplace, many of these things come very naturally to the people around me. They have so much experience that they may not even realize that something can be difficult in the first place. > > That can make you feel quite alone with it. You can find yourself sitting there thinking, 'Why can't I even figure out how to write this damn email? This should be incredibly easy.' Every difficulty she lists belongs to this type: collaborating, writing to a client, judging what a message needs. A skill practiced for years tends to become invisible to the person who has it, which is one reason this type is so rarely taught directly. It is also why it can be learned the way anyone else learned it, one concrete behavior at a time. ### 3. Self-management skills Self-management skills govern how you handle yourself at work: knowing what you are genuinely good at, building confidence by taking the next step rather than waiting to feel ready, and recovering from a setback by putting your energy into what you can control. Together with interpersonal skills, they make up what is usually called soft skills. They are the least visible type, yet they show up in every early-career moment that matters: the first time your work is corrected, the first task you have never done before, the first setback that was not your fault. If you finished a thesis while holding down a job, you have already practiced them, whether or not anyone gave it a name. Like the interpersonal type, they are behaviors you learn, not personality traits you either have or lack. ### 4. Resource management skills In O*NET's map, resource management skills are about allocating resources efficiently, and the resources are time, money, materials and people. Budgets and staff usually arrive later in a career. The resource you control from day one is your own time: clarifying what a request involves and when it is really due, [deciding what comes first](/knowledge/time-management/managing-competing-priorities/) when three tasks land at once, and, once you have built some credibility, saying no or not yet. That makes this type relevant long before anyone hands you a budget. It is also one of the easiest to evidence from student life. A semester in which you balanced coursework, a part-time job and a deadline-heavy project is a working record of how you allocate time. ### 5. Basic skills O*NET's basic skills are the capacities that make learning, and faster acquisition of knowledge, easier; [active learning](/knowledge/improve-skills/skills-in-learning/) is one of them. They are the foundation that job-specific knowledge is built on, which is why they matter most in exactly the period when you know least about the job. For a career starter, this can be the strongest type and the most underrated. Years of education have trained you to take in unfamiliar material quickly. When you join an organization, most of what you need to know is still ahead of you, so the ability to learn it fast is worth naming in its own right, backed by an example: the course you caught up on in a week, the software you learned in time for a project. ### 6. Problem-solving and systems skills Two of O*NET's groups describe thinking applied to real work. Complex problem-solving skills are used to solve new and challenging problems at work. Systems skills are capacities for understanding, monitoring and improving socio-technical systems, meaning the mix of people, processes and technology an organization runs on. The difference from schoolwork is the absence of an answer key. An exam problem has a known solution; a work problem often does not, and part of the skill is working out what the problem actually is. If you have run a project where nobody knew the outcome in advance, or figured out why a routine at your part-time job kept breaking down, you have evidence for this type. ### 7. Transferable skills Strictly speaking, transferable skills are not a separate pile next to the others. "Transferable" describes portability: any skill that keeps its value when you change job, sector or role. Some are hard, such as data analysis, typing speed or a foreign language. Some are soft, such as self-control, empathy and assertiveness. O*NET files its entire skill list under the heading of transferable skills, which shows how few work skills are locked to a single job. For a student, this is the most useful lens of all. It means coursework, a thesis, a café job or volunteering all build skills that count at work, even when the subject matter itself will never come up again. The catch is translation: describe each skill by what it does for someone else at work, and [an employer can recognize it](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/work-skills-cv/). ## Sorting your own experience into these types One skill can belong to several types at once. Communication is interpersonal and transferable; technical writing is a hard skill with communication at its core. So sort by asking questions rather than by filing. Take one piece of experience at a time, such as a part-time job, a group project or your thesis, and ask of it: What technical ability did this need? Whom did I have to work with, and how? What did I have to manage in myself, or in my time? Would any of it come with me to a different job? Write each answer down as a skill plus an example of where you used it and what happened as a result. The example is what turns a word on a list into something an employer can believe. When you weigh where to put your effort, keep in mind that hard skills often get you considered for a role, while the interpersonal and self-management types weigh at least as heavily in hiring. Where a type comes up empty, you have found a gap rather than a verdict: every type here is learnable, and the gap simply tells you where to start. The interpersonal and self-management types are also the hardest to rate from the inside, because few people have had much feedback on them. Rather than leaving that side blank or guessing generously, you can [check your own impression](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) against a structured measure and start from a picture you can trust. ## The skills behind an honest inventory The questions above are easier to ask than to answer well. Three skills do most of the work of answering them. **Building Self-Awareness** is what keeps the sorting honest. Being able to do something is not the same as being naturally strong at it, and the difference shows in three places: how you go about the work, how you feel while you do it, and the results it produces. The rest comes from other people. Ask someone who has watched you work a specific, forward-looking question, such as what would make your next report easier to use, and you start to see the skills you undervalue as well as the gaps you could not spot alone. What you find points to where to invest, never to a fixed label for the kind of worker you are. **Communication** is the skill that turns up in nearly every task, which makes it the easiest to examine part by part. It is not one vague talent but a set of separate behaviors you can practice: stating the main point first, writing an email that answers the question before it is asked, listening until the other person has finished, adjusting your message to the person receiving it, taking part in a meeting with something prepared. Rate yourself on each part and the general label becomes a short list of what to keep and what to work on. None of it depends on being outgoing; the listening side is as much a part of the skill as the speaking side. **Teamwork** is the skill group projects only partly prepared you for: at school the grade still lands on each person's record, while at work the result belongs to the group, and so does the responsibility for it. Its substance is concrete. You do what you committed to, share what you know without waiting to be asked, disagree about the work without making it personal, and then back the decision the team takes, even when you argued for another. Each of these can be found, or found missing, in a group project or a shift team. None of it requires being in charge, and none of it is the same as simply being easy to get along with. Each of the three improves with deliberate practice, which leaves one practical question: where to begin. That is the question the **free Job Skills Test** is built to answer. It shows where each of your work skills stands, **all twelve of them**, these three included, so you can [pick your first practice target](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) instead of trying to work on everything at once. Some of these types may already run through your working week without a name attached. If you have ever explained a task to a new colleague in the middle of a busy shift, then changed your explanation when the first one did not land, you were adapting a message to its receiver. That is evidence of communication you could put in an application tomorrow. The types you cannot evidence yet say nothing final about who you are. They are simply the next ones to build, in whatever order suits the work you want, and you stay entirely yourself while you build them. Software and methods change over a career; the way you work with people and manage yourself never goes out of date, and gaps on that side become harder to work around as more people depend on you. That is why an early, honest starting point is worth having. ## Find your starting point across your work skills What remains is to see the picture for yourself. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it covers all twelve and shows which of yours are already strengths to lead with 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. 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? Work skills split into hard and soft, with transferable skills cutting across both. See the main types of work skills, what each covers, and how to sort yours. ### 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-work-skills/ Preferred summary: "Work skills split into hard and soft, with transferable skills cutting across both. See the main types of work skills, what each covers, and how to sort yours." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.