# Examples of Skills and Attributes, and How to Make Yours Believable Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/examples-of-skills-and-attributes/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/examples-of-skills-and-attributes.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 Clear examples of skills and attributes, which ones employers value most, and how to back each one up with real evidence on your CV or in an interview. ## Key facts - Title: Examples of Skills and Attributes, and How to Make Yours Believable - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Professional Behaviors, Communication - Primary keyword: examples of skills and attributes - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/examples-of-skills-and-attributes/ ## What this page covers - Clear examples of skills and attributes, which ones employers value most, and how to back each one up with real evidence on your CV or in an interview. - Practical guidance for examples of skills and attributes - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation Examples of skills and attributes fall into two groups. Skills are things you've learned to do and can show: using design software, speaking Spanish, running a meeting, communicating clearly. Attributes are qualities in how you work: reliable, honest, determined, calm under pressure. On an application, each one counts only with a real example attached. If a form or an interviewer has just asked you for yours, finding the words is rarely the hard part. The hard part is choosing the ones that are honestly yours, and making them sound like more than words on a page. Both have practical answers, and they start with knowing what separates the two. ## What is the difference between skills and attributes? A skill is something you've learned and can demonstrate. Someone can watch you do it, test it, or check the result: a spreadsheet that works, a translation that reads well, a presentation that holds the room. An attribute describes the way you tend to go about things: carefully, honestly, with persistence, without losing your head when a deadline moves. Put simply, skills are what you do, and attributes are how you do it. The distinction matters because the two are proved differently. A skill is proved by an output. An attribute is proved by a pattern: the same behavior showing up in more than one place, so that a single example reads as a habit rather than a good day. When an application asks for your skills and attributes, it is really asking for both kinds of evidence. ## What are some examples of skills and attributes? Skills split into two broad groups: - Job-specific skills, often called [hard skills](/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/what-s-the-difference-between-hard-and-soft-skills/): teachable, measurable abilities such as using a particular software package, speaking a foreign language, or operating specialist machinery. - Workplace skills: how you work with other people and manage yourself, such as communication, teamwork, time management, decision-making, and networking. Most roles need some of each. The first group shows an employer you can do the task; the second shows how you'll do it alongside everyone else. Attributes are easier to pin down when you sort them by what they're about: - Toward your commitments: reliability, punctuality, determination. - Toward other people: honesty, integrity, kindness, an appropriate sense of humor. - Toward pressure and change: a positive attitude, staying calm when things go wrong. Look at that list again and most of it describes behavior. Punctuality is arriving on time. Reliability is a track record of finished commitments. Honesty is giving the real status of a task, not the comfortable one. That's why employers read attributes as a preview of what you'll be like to work with day to day, and it's also why you can show them rather than simply claim them. ## Is communication a skill or an attribute? It's a skill, even though it often feels like part of someone's personality. Stating your main point first, listening properly, and adjusting what you say to the person in front of you can all be taught, and all of them improve with practice. Teamwork sits on the same border and lands on the same side. The broader point is that the line between the two is blurry, and attributes aren't fixed either: they also strengthen with deliberate practice. So don't spend long deciding which column a quality belongs in. Nobody screening your application is grading your categories. What they're looking for is evidence behind each claim. ## What skills and attributes do employers look for? A useful reference point is the [career readiness framework](/knowledge/skills-standards/nace-competencies/) from NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers. It names eight competencies: career and self-development, communication, critical thinking, equity and inclusion, leadership, professionalism, teamwork, and technology. The current list comes from a 2021 revision that trimmed the original nine to eight. Because it was developed with employers and is used widely by university career centers, it gives you a vocabulary the people reading your application will recognize. Some of those carry particular weight. In NACE's Job Outlook 2016 survey, employers rated four of them between "essential" and "absolutely essential" for new college graduates: critical thinking and problem solving, professionalism and work ethic, teamwork, and communication. NACE research also points to one place where graduates' and employers' priorities part ways. Both sides agree that communication, critical thinking, teamwork, and professionalism matter a great deal, but on leadership and on career and self-development there is a sizable gap between how important each side considers them. That makes self-development easy to misjudge, so it pays to show it deliberately rather than leave it implied: a skill you taught yourself, a piece of feedback you acted on, a course you took because a job asked for something you didn't have yet. ## How do I know which skills and attributes are really mine? Work backward from evidence, not forward from a list of what sounds good. Go over the last two or three years (courses, part-time work, volunteering, group projects, sport, anything with other people and deadlines in it) and look for three signals: work where your results were clearly better than usual, tasks that gave you more energy than they took, and things people kept coming back to ask you to do. A quality that shows up in two or three of those places is a real candidate. One that only appears on a list you liked the sound of isn't. Then test your picture against people who have seen you work. A tutor, a shift supervisor, or a teammate can correct blind spots in both directions: the strengths you overrate, and the ones you take so much for granted you'd never think to write down. [Ask for something specific](/knowledge/self-awareness/questions-to-ask-for-feedback/), such as what they would hand you without checking it afterward, rather than a general verdict. The honest version of this question can be uncomfortable. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described it like this: > One thing is what the university says the degree qualifies you for. Another is whether I, as a student, can honestly feel I can do those things when I apply. The gap she describes is a normal one, and it closes through evidence rather than through confidence: once you can point to where you did something, you can claim it honestly. If you'd like a structured starting point to set next to other people's feedback, the free Job Skills Test gives you an [outside view of your skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), which makes it easier to see which strengths you can put forward with confidence. ## How do I describe my skills and attributes on a CV or résumé? Give every claim a situation. "Excellent communication skills" tells an employer nothing they can check, and they won't assume you're a strong speaker just because your CV says you led seminars. Make the link yourself: name the quality, the situation, what you did, and what came of it. Break broad labels into the actions underneath them. Penn State's Smeal College of Business career office, drawing on the NACE competencies, describes the communication employers look for as three behaviors: articulating ideas clearly, listening actively, and tailoring messages to different audiences. Each one is something you can point to. A line such as "rewrote the volunteer guide for first-time volunteers, cutting it from ten pages to three" shows a message tailored to its audience far better than the word "communicator" does. For attributes, show the pattern rather than a single moment. "Reliable" becomes believable as "trusted to open the store alone from my second month, across two years of weekend shifts." "Determined" becomes "retook statistics and passed it while working twenty hours a week." Keep the list short. Three or four qualities, each with a concrete example, persuade more than ten adjectives with nothing behind them. The examples don't need a professional job behind them, either: [a part-time job](/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills/), a team project, or a role in a student club counts if it shows the quality. ## What should I say when they ask what I can bring to the role? Start with the job description. It's where the employer signals which skills and attributes matter for this particular role, and the people screening applications are checking against it. Choose the three or four of yours that match best, and put the matching evidence first. In an interview, the same rule works out loud. Lead with the quality, give the example in two or three sentences, and finish with the result. One real example, told briefly, lands better than a long answer that tries to cover everything you can do. If the role asks for something you can't evidence yet, say what you've done that comes closest and how you're building the rest. That's an honest answer, and it shows you take your own development seriously. Notice what every one of these answers ended up asking for: not a better word, but a better example. Where those examples come from, and how well they land, is less a matter of luck than it looks. ## What makes an example convincing People who answer these questions well tend to lean on the same three abilities, whether or not they would name them. **Building Self-Awareness** is where a list stops being borrowed. It means separating what you're genuinely good at from what you can merely get through, and it relies on feedback as much as reflection: hearing what someone says without arguing, adding your own view, then deciding what to take from it. Asking for specific, forward-looking advice, such as what to do more of next term, is part of the skill. Strengths found this way hold up under a follow-up question, because you know exactly where they came from. **Professional Behaviors** is where many attributes turn out to live. Punctuality, respect, humility, a positive outlook, appreciation of others, humor that fits the room, openness to change: in practice these are things you do, like handling confidential information carefully, speaking about colleagues as if they were present, or looking for the positive when a plan falls apart. Treated as behaviors rather than character, they are things you can practice, notice in yourself, and prove with a specific moment, which is exactly what an application needs. **Communication** is the skill on nearly every list, which makes it the hardest one to claim believably. It helps to take it apart: being clear and direct, putting the main point first, listening actively, keeping an email short, coming prepared to a meeting. Choose the part you can actually evidence and name that rather than the whole. The same habits shape how you present everything else, briefly and concretely with the main point first, so a well-built answer about your strengths quietly demonstrates one of them. None of the three is fixed, and none asks you to become someone else. The free Job Skills Test looks at these three **alongside nine other workplace skills** and shows you [the ones worth building next](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), so the examples you collect over the coming months are the ones that strengthen your next application. ## Starting with what you've already done Some of this may already be visible in an ordinary week of yours. If you've ever been the one a supervisor messaged when a shift needed covering, or the person who quietly rebuilt the group's slides the night before a presentation, you already have an example worth writing down. The skills you haven't built yet are learnable the same way, through practice rather than a change of personality, so you can grow into them and still be yourself. The question of what you bring won't stop at your first application; it returns in reviews and at every move after that, carrying a little more weight each time, which is why noticing your own evidence is a habit worth starting now. What's left is getting the whole picture in one place. ## See which strengths you can already prove The only step left is to trade guesswork for a clear picture. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your workplace skills. In 7 minutes it shows where you stand across twelve of them, and which ones will make the biggest difference to how you describe yourself in your next application or interview. ## 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? Clear examples of skills and attributes, which ones employers value most, and how to back each one up with real evidence on your CV or in an interview. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Professional Behaviors, Communication. ### 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/communication.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/examples-of-skills-and-attributes/ Preferred summary: "Clear examples of skills and attributes, which ones employers value most, and how to back each one up with real evidence on your CV or in an interview." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.