# How to Define Personal Skills and Name Your Own Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/define-personal-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/define-personal-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 Personal skills govern how you manage yourself and work with others. Learn how they differ from traits, the main types, and how to define yours with proof. ## Key facts - Title: How to Define Personal Skills and Name Your Own - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Professional Behaviors, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: define personal skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/define-personal-skills/ ## What this page covers - Personal skills govern how you manage yourself and work with others. Learn how they differ from traits, the main types, and how to define yours with proof. - Practical guidance for define personal skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation Personal skills are the nontechnical skills that determine how you manage yourself at work and how you work with other people. To define personal skills precisely, separate them from two neighbors: hard skills, which are technical and measurable, and personality traits, which describe what you are like rather than what you do. That distinction matters most at the moment an application form or [CV template](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/personal-skills-for-a-resume/) asks you to list yours, and the words that come to mind (hardworking, friendly, team player) feel either too generic to mean anything or too much like bragging. There is a better way to fill that space, and it starts with knowing what the category actually contains. ## Where personal skills begin and end Personal skills, soft skills, people skills, employability skills: the labels overlap heavily and get used loosely, employers included. So when an application asks for your personal skills, it is asking about the same territory as soft skills, not a separate category you have to decode. What sets that territory apart is its contrast with hard skills, which are technical, taught and measurable: a programming language, a bookkeeping method, a forklift license. You either hold the certificate or you don't. Personal skills cover everything else about how you do the job: how you handle a colleague who disagrees with you, whether the task you promised arrives when you said it would, how you respond when your plan falls apart halfway through. There is also a firm outer boundary. The National Research Council's 2012 report *Education for Life and Work* sorts the skills needed for work and life into three domains: cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal. The cognitive domain is knowledge and reasoning, the part that exams and degrees mostly measure. Personal skills occupy the other two. That is why a strong transcript says little about them, and why a modest one does not rule them out. The boundary that matters most in practice runs between a personal skill and a personal quality. A quality describes a disposition: friendly, curious, calm. A skill is the how behind what you do, a behavior you can perform on purpose, practice and get better at: [asking for feedback](/knowledge/self-awareness/questions-to-ask-for-feedback/) before a deadline rather than after it, following up when a meeting ends without a decision, [saying no clearly](/knowledge/time-management/how-to-say-no-without-hurting-someone-feelings/) when your week is already full. "Hardworking" is a quality. Breaking a large assignment into weekly pieces and handing it in early is the skill behind it. An employer can assess the second; the first they can only take on trust. It also means defining your personal skills never requires changing your personality. A quiet person can learn to make their point in a meeting and still be a quiet person. ## Personal skills point in two directions Interpersonal skills face outward, toward other people. Intrapersonal skills face inward: how you understand and regulate yourself. When people list their personal skills, they tend to name only the outward, visible ones, yet the inward ones decide how reliably the outward ones show up once the pressure rises. Within the inward half, two kinds do most of the work early in a career, which gives three types worth knowing. ### Interpersonal skills These are the skills you use whenever someone else is involved: communicating clearly in conversation, email and meetings, working as a dependable part of a team, handling disagreement without making it personal, building a working relationship with your manager, and, as responsibility grows, influencing and leading. The National Research Council groups this domain into two clusters, teamwork and collaboration, and leadership, with communication and conflict resolution among its named examples. What sets interpersonal skills apart is that they are visible in the moment. Colleagues and interviewers observe them directly, which is why first impressions at work are formed largely through them, and why they are usually the easiest to give an example of. ### Intrapersonal skills: self-understanding and self-belief This is the knowing and steadying side of managing yourself: recognizing what you are genuinely good at, noticing how you react under pressure, reflecting on how you learn and adjusting (what the National Research Council calls metacognition), building confidence in specific tasks, and recovering from frustration or a setback. The report files the self-belief part under a cluster it names positive core self-evaluation. These skills are mostly invisible to others. They show up indirectly, in how consistently your outward skills hold: whether you still put your idea forward in the next meeting after the last one was turned down, or whether one critical comment derails your week. ### Intrapersonal skills: work ethic and self-direction The third type is the self-management side: being organized, responsible and hardworking, and directing your own work, which in practice means prioritizing, clarifying what a task actually requires before saying yes, and making sensible judgment calls within your remit. Of all the intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies, the National Research Council found that conscientiousness (being organized, responsible and hardworking) is the one most highly correlated with desirable educational and career outcomes. The mechanism is cumulative: reliability compounds across every task and every working relationship. What distinguishes this type is that it is judged over time rather than in a single interaction. Nobody sees it in one meeting; everyone notices it over a semester or a quarter. A useful definition of your own personal skills draws on all three types, though not in equal measure for every job. Customer-facing roles lean hardest on the interpersonal side; independent, deadline-driven work leans on self-direction. Knowing which a role needs tells you where to look for your evidence. ## How to define personal skills you can actually back up Knowing the types still leaves the harder question of which ones are yours. It is a question one of the young people we interviewed about starting work asked outright: > Why should I be able to contribute anything when nobody has told me what I actually can do? Nobody is going to hand you that list. You can build it yourself, though, and most of the raw material is already in your past few years. Start with situations, not adjectives. Think back over a group project, a [part-time job](/knowledge/types-of-skills/define-transferable-skills/), a volunteer role or a club you helped run, and ask what you actually did when something went wrong, when a deadline moved forward, or when people disagreed. Each honest answer points to a behavior, and each behavior points to a skill. Then translate every quality you were tempted to write into the conduct behind it. "Team player" becomes the week a group member dropped out and you redistributed their sections so the presentation still happened on schedule. "Calm under pressure" becomes the Saturday two colleagues called in sick and you kept the café queue moving without a single complaint reaching the manager. A personal skill described this way is something an employer can picture. Check your list against someone else's view. A person who has worked alongside you, whether a supervisor, a teammate or a fellow volunteer, will recognize some of your skills immediately and may point to one you had not noticed. If you are unsure which behaviors are genuinely strong and which you are only hoping are, a short self-assessment gives you [an outside reference point](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) to check your list against before it goes on an application. Finally, back each skill with one example: the situation, what you did, and what came of it. Personal skills cannot be proven with a certificate, which is exactly why interviews ask about past situations ("tell me about a time when…") instead of asking you to rate yourself. Three or four skills, each with one real example and matched to what the role leans on, make a stronger definition than a list of ten adjectives. ## Why a short list is not a fixed one If your list feels thin right now, that describes what you have practiced so far, not who you are. The National Research Council committee views these competencies as malleable: they change in response to life experience, education and deliberate intervention. Every situation you handle on purpose, such as the first time you ask for feedback rather than waiting for it, or the first time you turn down a request clearly, adds both a skill and a new example. Pick one behavior that matters for your next step and practice it somewhere the stakes are low. ## The skills that make your list hold up Defining your own personal skills asks three things of you: noticing what you actually do well, naming it as conduct an employer recognizes, and claiming it without overselling. Each of those leans on a skill of its own. **Building Self-Awareness** is where an honest list begins. It is the difference between what you are genuinely good at and what you are merely competent at, and it relies on feedback from people who have worked with you to show strengths, and blind spots, that you cannot see from the inside. Without it, any list of personal skills is borrowed rather than yours. **Professional Behaviors** gives the question of which skills count a concrete answer. Much of what employers watch for is basic conduct: showing respect and genuine interest, staying open to change, being on time, completing the administrative tasks nobody enjoys without complaint. Expressed as things you have been seen doing, qualities like "reliable" or "friendly" become skills you can name. **Building Confidence** matters because the belief that you can do something specific is built by doing it, one manageable step at a time, and each step leaves evidence behind. That evidence is what lets you state a personal skill plainly instead of hedging it or inflating it. Confidence in this sense is a record of what you have done, not a pep talk. The Job Skills Test measures these three as behaviors rather than traits, because behaviors are what you can practice, and it does the same for the rest of a set that runs to **twelve skills in all**. That way you can [spot the ones already working](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) for you and the ones that deserve your practice next. ## What you are already working with You may recognize some of this from your own weeks. If a supervisor at a part-time job ever handed you the new starter to show around, someone had already spotted a personal skill in you before you had a word for it. The list you write from here is yours to extend: you decide which behavior to work on next, and you stay recognizably yourself while it grows. Technical know-how often gets you the first job; how you work weighs more with every year after it, which is a good reason to start practicing these behaviors now, while the stakes are small. Knowing your starting point makes that choice much easier. ## See which personal skills you can already claim You can have that starting point today. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it shows where you stand across all twelve skills and which ones will do the most for your applications, so every personal skill you list is one you can back. ## 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? Personal skills govern how you manage yourself and work with others. Learn how they differ from traits, the main types, and how to define yours with proof. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Professional Behaviors, Building Confidence. ### 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/types-of-skills.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/define-personal-skills/ Preferred summary: "Personal skills govern how you manage yourself and work with others. Learn how they differ from traits, the main types, and how to define yours with proof." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.