# Examples of Skills, and How to Show the Ones You Have Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/examples-of-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/examples-of-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 Examples of skills, from data analysis and programming to communication, teamwork and time management, with what each looks like as evidence on a resume. ## Key facts - Title: Examples of Skills, and How to Show the Ones You Have - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: examples of skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/examples-of-skills/ ## What this page covers - Examples of skills, from data analysis and programming to communication, teamwork and time management, with what each looks like as evidence on a resume. - Practical guidance for examples of skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation Examples of skills fall into two main groups. Hard skills are technical and measurable: data analysis, programming, budgeting, a foreign language. Interpersonal and self-management skills shape how you work with others and run your own work: communication, teamwork, time management, decision-making. Employers hiring new graduates weigh the second group at least as heavily as the first. Knowing the list is the easy part. The harder part is deciding which of these skills you can [honestly claim](/knowledge/types-of-skills/assess-abilities/), and describing them so an employer believes you. That depends less on a skill's name than on what it looks like when you actually use it. ## Hard, interpersonal and transferable: how examples of skills sort Hard skills are the technical abilities taught in school, in training or on the job. They tend to belong to a particular field, and they are the simplest to prove, because a certificate, a portfolio or a work sample can show them directly. Interpersonal and self-management skills cover how you communicate, collaborate, organize your time and make decisions. They apply in every job, which is exactly why a claim like "strong communicator" means little on its own. It only convinces when it comes with a concrete example of you doing it. Transferable skills are less a third pile than a property: any skill that carries from one role, industry or situation to the next. Almost every interpersonal skill is transferable, and some hard skills are too. That matters if your [work history is thin](/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-and-experience/), because what you built in coursework, a part-time job or volunteering still counts as evidence for your first full-time role. The labels overlap, too. Time management and decision-making are interpersonal skills and transferable skills at the same time. The category matters far less than recognizing which skills you have and can demonstrate. ## Examples of skills, and what each looks like in practice The first five examples below are interpersonal or self-management skills; the last four are hard skills. Each one comes with the kind of behavior that turns it from a word on a page into evidence. ### 1. Communication Communication means getting your point across clearly and listening properly to what others say. According to NACE's Job Outlook 2025 survey, it ranks alongside problem-solving and teamwork among the attributes employers look for most in new college graduates. The reasoning is simple: job-specific technical skills are largely learned on the job, so employers screen for what predicts how smoothly a new hire will work with other people. On a resume, it looks like this: you wrote the weekly update for a student society and cut it to the three points members actually needed, or you summarized a long meeting for your manager in four lines. ### 2. Teamwork Teamwork is working toward a shared result rather than a personal one, and it sits next to communication near the top of the same NACE ranking. Its most convincing proof is reliability: doing what you said you would, when you said you would. Group projects are where most students build it, but "worked in a team" proves nothing. "Took over the data section when a teammate dropped out and delivered it on the agreed date" does. ### 3. Time management Time management covers organizing your work and meeting your commitments. It overlaps closely with being organized and dependable, which is why it counts as both an interpersonal skill and a transferable one. A credible example names the system and the result: you kept a shared schedule for a four-person project, broke the final report into weekly pieces, and flagged a slipping task a week before the deadline instead of the night before. ### 4. Decision-making Decision-making at work means making sound choices within the authority you have: gathering the facts, asking someone with more experience, and settling on a good-enough answer rather than waiting for a perfect one. Like time management, it sits in both the interpersonal and the transferable camp. A strong example shows your process, not just the outcome: you compared three venues for a department event on price and capacity, checked with last year's organizer, and booked one before the deadline. ### 5. Getting and applying influence Influence starts with initiative: [acting before you are asked](/knowledge/influence/take-the-initiative/) and moving work forward. Initiative is one of the most transferable skills there is, because it does not depend on any employer's tools or processes. Early in a career it rarely looks dramatic. You volunteered to draft the group's proposal, set the agenda for a meeting nobody wanted to organize, or asked to sit in on a project you wanted to learn from, and then followed through. ### 6. Data analysis Data analysis is a hard skill: working with numbers or records to find out what they show. It is also the clearest proof that transferable skills are not only interpersonal ones, because the same ability moves between very different fields. Show it with the task and the result: you cleaned and analyzed survey responses for your thesis in a spreadsheet and turned them into three charts your supervisor used in a presentation. ### 7. Software proficiency and programming These are hard skills in the strictest sense: technical, measurable and often tied to a particular job. Their advantage is that they can be shown rather than described. A certificate, a portfolio, a link to code you wrote or a sample of work produced in a specific program does more than any sentence about being "good with computers." ### 8. A foreign language A foreign language is a hard skill built through formal classes or informal practice, and it is unusually easy to measure. State your level plainly and, where you can, back it with a certificate or with what you have used it for. Handling customer emails in a second language at a part-time job says more than a level on its own. ### 9. Budgeting and project management Budgeting and project management are hard skills usually learned through training or work experience, and they are often specific to an industry. You may already have more of them than you think. If you managed the money for a student event or coordinated a project over several weeks with fixed milestones, you have a genuine starting example to build on. ## How to turn examples of skills into your own evidence The gap between knowing examples of skills and being able to use them is the gap between an adjective and a behavior. Anyone can write "organized" or "team player." Nobody can fake "kept a shared project schedule for a four-person group and caught a delay a week early," because it can be checked and asked about in an interview. One pattern works for every skill on the list: what the situation was, what you did, and what came of it. Start where you have spent the most time, which for most students is coursework. Researching a topic, structuring a long paper, presenting to a seminar and dividing up a group assignment all contain skills from the list above, even if nobody ever called them that. Many students underestimate what they already bring to a workplace. If you recognize that hesitation, you are not alone in it. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described it like this: > As a student you don't expect to be able to contribute anything. Sometimes I felt I could — because being in the education system now, you're actually better placed academically than people who left it years ago. It also helps to drop the idea that interpersonal skills are personality traits you either have or lack. Communicating clearly, managing your time and working well in a team are behaviors, and behaviors improve with practice. A skill you cannot yet back with an example is a gap you can close, not a verdict on who you are. If you are unsure which of these you could honestly claim today, it is worth taking a moment to [see which skills you can back up](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you write the [skills section of your resume](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/career-skills-resume/). ## What makes it easier to name your skills with confidence Look back over the examples and a pattern appears. The difficulty was rarely the skill itself. It was noticing it in your own history, putting it into words, and showing it in the company of other people. **Building Self-Awareness** is where a credible skills list begins. You cannot choose your examples until you know which skills are genuinely yours: not just things you can do, but things where your results are good and the work comes naturally. Asking a former shift lead or project partner what they would rely on you for gives you specifics you would not spot alone, and it points to the strengths worth putting first. **Communication** is the example nearly everyone claims, which is why the generic version carries so little weight. The convincing version is a habit you can point to: putting the main point first in an email, listening fully before you answer, preparing for a meeting instead of improvising. It grows through practice rather than charisma, so it can be worked on deliberately. **Teamwork** is where most early-career evidence already sits, in group projects and shifts worked alongside others. What makes it believable is the specific behavior inside the group: doing what you committed to, sharing what you knew, disagreeing about the issue rather than the person, and then backing the decision the group made. The free Job Skills Test measures all three, **along with nine others that turn up in almost every job**, and shows you [which gap to work on first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). Each of them can be learned, which is what makes knowing your starting point useful. Parts of this list may already describe your last semester better than you expected. If you were the one in a group project who sent the reminder about the shared deadline, you have a time management example; it only needs a sentence. The skills you have not built yet can be developed the same way, through practice, in a style that is still your own. And because the interpersonal side of the list tends to weigh more as your work starts to depend on other people, the useful question is not whether to work on these skills but which one to start with. ## Find out which skills you can already show All that remains is to see where you stand. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: it scores you across twelve skills, including communication and teamwork, and shows which ones would add the most to your next application or interview. It takes 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? Examples of skills, from data analysis and programming to communication, teamwork and time management, with what each looks like as evidence on a resume. ### 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/types-of-skills.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/types-of-skills/examples-of-skills/ Preferred summary: "Examples of skills, from data analysis and programming to communication, teamwork and time management, with what each looks like as evidence on a resume." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.