# Workforce Skills: The Three Layers Employers Look For Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/workforce-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/workforce-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 Workforce skills come in three layers: basic, technical and the transferable skills employers find hardest to hire for. What each means and how to build them. ## Key facts - Title: Workforce Skills: The Three Layers Employers Look For - Category: Soft Skills at Work - Primary skill: Professional Behaviors - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: workforce skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/workforce-skills/ ## What this page covers - Workforce skills come in three layers: basic, technical and the transferable skills employers find hardest to hire for. What each means and how to build them. - Practical guidance for workforce skills - How this topic connects to Professional Behaviors ## Detailed explanation Workforce skills are the abilities you need to do a job well, and they come in three layers: basic skills such as reading, numeracy and digital basics; technical skills tied to a specific role; and a transferable layer covering how you communicate, work with others and manage your own work. Employers find that last layer hardest to hire for. If your education has given you plenty of the first two and left the third mostly to trial and error, you are in a common position, and a fixable one: the third layer is learned behavior, not talent. Why employers weigh it so heavily comes down to one property the other two layers lack. ## What workforce skills means The term is used in two ways. For an individual, workforce skills are what you bring to a job. For an employer, the same phrase describes the skills inventory it maps across its whole staff, and some organizations now plan hiring and training around [skills rather than job titles](/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-based-approach/). For you, both uses point the same way: employers increasingly describe and evaluate people by the skills they can demonstrate, not only by the title they hold. That is why the term turns up in job ads, performance frameworks and development plans. Part of the confusion is vocabulary. Soft skills, essential skills, employability skills, core skills, transversal skills and 21st-century skills overlap heavily, and most of them point at the same nontechnical layer. You do not need to sort out the labels. The more useful map is the one the Skills Builder Partnership uses: three tiers, separated by how far each one travels. ## The three layers of workforce skills ### Basic skills Literacy, numeracy and basic digital skills form the floor. Almost every job assumes them, and once you have finished your education, most employers take them for granted. They rarely set one candidate apart from another. They are a threshold, not a differentiator. ### Technical skills Technical skills are the knowledge and abilities that belong to a particular sector or role: accounting standards, a programming language, clinical procedures, a design tool. This is mostly what a degree or vocational qualification certifies, and it is often what gets you through the first screening. Their limit is portability. Technical skills are not easily transferred beyond the sector or role they belong to, so part of what you learn for one job loses value when you move into a different kind of work. ### Essential skills The third tier is the transferable one: how you communicate and listen, how you work in a team, how you handle the relationship with your manager, how you conduct yourself, and how you organize your own time and work. In the Skills Builder model, these skills are [highly transferable](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/transferable-skills-for-jobs/), and they are what allows specialist knowledge to be applied in practice, with and through other people. A sharp analysis that nobody understands, or that arrives two days late, does little for the team that needed it. This layer travels. It works the same way in a hospital, a consultancy or a startup, and it keeps paying off in every job after your first. It is also the layer education covers least directly. Much of it consists of unspoken norms rather than taught content, which is why so many people pick it up by trial and error, and why it is worth learning on purpose. ## Why employers weigh the nontechnical layer so heavily In a Wall Street Journal survey of executives, 92% said soft skills were as important as technical skills or more so, and 89% said they had difficulty finding candidates who had them. The mechanism is scarcity. Technical skills can be screened through qualifications; the nontechnical layer is harder to verify and less often taught. A candidate who can show it stands out more than another credential would make them stand out. The specific skills employers name are remarkably consistent: - In a 2019 survey of more than 650 US employers, conducted by Morning Consult for Cengage, the most in-demand skills were [listening](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/how-to-be-a-good-listener/) (74%), attention to detail (70%) and communication (69%). - In NACE's Job Outlook 2014, employers rated the ability to work in a team structure highest, at 4.55 on a five-point scale, followed by the ability to make decisions and solve problems (4.50) and the ability to [plan, organize and prioritize work](/knowledge/time-management/prioritise-workload/) (4.48). - In a 2022 Harris Poll of Canadian hiring managers for Express Employment Professionals, willingness to learn (85%) and dependability (84%) led the list, and 30% of companies with open positions said they could not find candidates with the right soft skills. Strip away the different wording and four things recur: listening and communicating clearly, working well in a team, being dependable, and organizing your own work. That is a short list, not an endless one, and every item on it is a behavior you can practice. Dependability ranking almost level with willingness to learn is worth noticing if you are new: reliability is judged from your first weeks, long before your technical work has had a chance to impress anyone. The same Cengage survey found that more than a third of employers (34%) felt schools had not properly prepared students for jobs. Read that as a gap in teaching, not in ability. What was never taught can still be learned, deliberately, once you know exactly what to work on. ## How to build workforce skills deliberately Because this layer is made of behaviors rather than traits, it changes the way any behavior changes: by doing it, noticing the result and adjusting. You do not have to become a different person. You learn the rules most workplaces run on and practice them in your own style. The hardest part is often that the rules are invisible. If you have ever sensed that everyone around you knows something about how things are done that nobody has told you, you are in good company. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described it like this: > I didn't always know what was considered appropriate, and sometimes I was told that I wasn't behaving in quite the way people expected. > > It was often about very small things: when it was OK to approach a colleague with a question, when you should wait, how much you should interrupt, or when something was important enough to take to your manager. > > I understood that there were unwritten rules about these things — don't interrupt unnecessarily in meetings, don't constantly pull your manager away from what they are doing, and be mindful of other people's time. > > The difficulty was that nobody had given me a handbook for any of it. I knew the informal rules existed, but I didn't yet understand what they were, where the boundaries were, or the spirit behind them. The way through is to make the unwritten rules visible, one at a time. A few starting points work in almost any setting, including a student job, an internship or a group project: - Commit only to what you can deliver, and say so early, not on the deadline, when something is going to slip. - When you take on a task, confirm who it is for, what exactly is needed, when it is due and what a good result looks like. Write that down and check it back with the person who asked. - Lead your messages with the main point, keep them short, and make sure you have understood a request before you act on it. - Share what you know and give credit to the team. When you disagree, say so before the decision is made, then carry out what the group decides. - Watch how experienced colleagues handle interruptions, meetings and email, and ask when you are unsure. Asking is how an unwritten rule becomes one you know. Trying to improve all of it at once spreads your effort too thin. It works better to [find your weakest work skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) first and concentrate your practice there, since each of them responds to deliberate repetition. ## The skills behind being ready for the workforce Look back at the four things employers keep naming. None of them is a credential. Each describes how someone behaves on an ordinary working day, and that behavior has a few distinct sources. **Professional Behaviors** is where dependability starts. Being on time, handling administrative tasks without complaint, treating everyone with the same respect, and speaking about colleagues as if they were in the room: none of it is impressive on its own, but together it tells a team you can be relied on before anyone has seen your best work. These are norms you learn and practice, not a personality you adopt. You stay yourself and learn the rules most workplaces run on. **Communication** is how your technical knowledge reaches anyone else. At work it means listening to understand before you answer, putting the main point first, keeping it brief, and adapting to the person you are talking to instead of writing the way you did for a grader. It also means speaking up, because an idea you keep to yourself never becomes part of the work. **Teamwork** turns individual effort into shared results. Unlike most graded work, almost everything at work is done with and for other people, so the team's common purpose comes before your own agenda. Trust grows when you do what you committed to, share knowledge freely and give the team the credit; when you disagree, you say so, then commit to the decision and help carry it out. To see which of the three you can already show an employer as a strength, the **free Job Skills Test** [scores each of these skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) along with the rest of a wider set of twelve. A low score marks a behavior you can start practicing this week, not a verdict on what you can do. Some of this may already be part of how you work. If you have been the one in a group project who wrote up who was doing what by when, or the person at a student job who always confirmed a shift swap in writing, you have practiced dependability in a form an employer recognizes. The parts you have not built yet are not fixed. They grow with practice, in your own way of working. Because this layer carries over into every job after the next one, it tends to count for more the further your career goes. What remains is knowing where to begin. ## See where your workforce skills stand The only step left is finding your starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: it shows how you score across all twelve, including the three above, and which ones would make the biggest difference as you move into the workforce. It takes about 7 minutes. **[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? Workforce skills come in three layers: basic, technical and the transferable skills employers find hardest to hire for. What each means and how to build them. ### 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/workforce-skills/ Preferred summary: "Workforce skills come in three layers: basic, technical and the transferable skills employers find hardest to hire for. What each means and how to build them." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.