# Individual Skills: What They Are and How to Find Your Own Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/individual-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/individual-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 Individual skills are the capabilities you carry into any job or team. Learn the main types, how they differ from team skills, and how to identify your own. ## Key facts - Title: Individual Skills: What They Are and How to Find Your Own - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Teamwork, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: individual skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/individual-skills/ ## What this page covers - Individual skills are the capabilities you carry into any job or team. Learn the main types, how they differ from team skills, and how to identify your own. - Practical guidance for individual skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation Individual skills are the capabilities you carry with you from one job, team, and situation to the next: the technical know-how of your field, plus the way you manage yourself and the way you work with other people. They belong to you rather than to any group, which is why employers judge them person by person. That matters most when you are about to start working, or have just started, and someone asks what you personally bring. The question sounds simple. It gets easier to answer once you see that individual skills come in a few distinct kinds, and that each kind is spotted and described in its own way. ## The main types of individual skills There is no single official list of individual skills, but career guidance keeps returning to the same basic split. The University of Waterloo's Centre for Career Development divides skills into two main categories: technical skills, which are know-how specific to a professional field, and [transferable skills](/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills/), which apply across many parts of work and life. The University of Maryland's career services uses a three-part version of the same idea: work content skills, self-management skills, and transferable skills. Put together, these models give you four useful lenses for looking at your own skill set, plus one distinction that saves a lot of confusion. ### Technical skills Technical skills, sometimes called work content skills, are the know-how that belongs to a particular field: a programming language, an accounting system, a laboratory method, a design tool, a body of legal or clinical knowledge. You usually learn them through education or on the job, and you can often prove them with a qualification or a piece of work. They are also the part of your skill set that job ads name most explicitly. That is useful, because you can match yourself against the list. It is also misleading, because it makes the technical side look like the whole picture. Technical skills often decide whether you are considered for a role. They rarely decide on their own how well you do in it. ### Self-management skills Self-management skills are about how you manage yourself and your work: organizing your time, keeping commitments, staying steady when a task goes wrong, knowing where your strengths lie and asking for feedback on where they don't. The Georgia Department of Labor's job-search guidance goes as far as treating self-management skills as a synonym for soft skills, describing them as the ability to control your own thoughts, feelings, and actions. That framing is worth taking seriously. Much of what makes a new colleague easy to rely on happens inward first: noticing that you are about to miss a deadline and raising it early, or taking a [piece of criticism](/knowledge/self-awareness/handle-criticism/) without letting it spoil the next week. The University of Maryland's model adds a detail many career starters miss: part of this group develops early in life. If you have juggled study with a part-time job, trained for a sport, or looked after younger siblings, you have been practicing self-management for years. ### Interpersonal skills Interpersonal skills are about how you relate to and work with others: communicating clearly, collaborating on shared work, [handling disagreement](/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-disagree-respectfully/) without turning it personal, being someone colleagues can count on. Because they are used with other people, they are easy to mistake for group properties. They are not. You carry them into every new team you join, and a new team experiences them from the first week. This is where many people undersell themselves. Group projects, student organizations, customer-facing jobs, and volunteer roles all produce interpersonal skills, even when nobody called them that at the time. ### Transferable skills Transferable skills are defined by where they work rather than by what they contain: they are the skills that travel across jobs, industries, and roles. In the two-category model they are the counterpart to technical skills, and most self-management and interpersonal skills fall into this group. Their portability is what makes them valuable early in a career. Your first job may have little to do with your degree, and your third may have little to do with your first. The technical content changes; the way you organize your work and treat the people around you comes along every time. Even in highly technical environments, the non-technical side counts as part of a person's competence: a review of Industry 4.0 workforce skills, published in the journal P2P & Inovação, lists social skills such as motivation and teamwork among the individual skills workers need, next to technical ones. ### Skills versus personal attributes The University of Waterloo makes a distinction worth borrowing: personal attributes are related to skills but are not the same thing. Patience, curiosity, or a calm temperament describe tendencies. Skills describe what you do, and what you can practice. The distinction matters because of what it does to a gap. If you decide you are "just not a confident person," there is nothing to work on. If you notice instead that you rarely speak in the first ten minutes of a meeting, you have found a behavior, and behaviors can be changed one step at a time without changing who you are. ## Individual skills vs. team skills A common worry is that individual skills and teamwork pull in opposite directions, as if being strong on your own makes you a weaker team player. The relationship actually runs the other way. Individual competence is the knowledge and know-how a person holds and can show. Collective competence (shared routines, a common language, the way a group coordinates) exists only at the level of the team. A group of individually qualified people is not automatically a capable team, but no capable team is built without capable individuals. What each member reliably brings is the raw material the team's competence is made from. So the question is not whether to be strong individually or strong as a teammate. Part of your individual skill set is how well your contribution plugs into other people's work: whether you deliver what you promised, share what you know, and stay useful when the plan changes. ## How to identify your own individual skills Knowing the categories is one thing. Saying which skills are actually yours is harder, especially when you have little work experience to point to. If you doubt you have much to offer yet, you are in good company. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work told us: > 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. The way past that doubt is evidence rather than impression. University career centers often use skills inventories for exactly this: the University of Utah's College of Humanities, for example, offers a transferable skills inventory on which you mark the skills you have used and rate them. Doing something similar yourself works well: - **List situations, not adjectives.** Write down specific moments from study, jobs, and activities: a project you rescued, a disagreement you settled, a deadline you met while juggling other things. - **Name the skill each situation shows.** Sort them into technical, self-management, and interpersonal skills. One situation often shows more than one. - **Rate strength and enjoyment separately.** A skill you are good at and enjoy using points toward your [natural strengths](/knowledge/setting-goals/play-to-your-strengths/). A skill you are good at but find draining is still worth listing, though it may not be where you want to build your career. - **Ask someone who has seen you work.** A teacher, manager, or teammate will often name a strength you take for granted, or a blind spot you cannot see. The same evidence then does double duty. On a résumé or in an interview, a skill backed by a situation and a result ("kept a four-person project on schedule after two members dropped out") is far more convincing than a skill on its own ("organized, team player"). If you would like a structured starting point before you build that list, the Job Skills Test can help you [map your own skill set](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) across the skills employers care about. Your inventory will also show gaps. That is the point of doing it, not a reason to worry. A gap in an individual skill is something you have not practiced yet, and practice is exactly how these skills grow. ## The skills that help you know and grow what you bring Look back at what that inventory asks of you: an honest read of your strengths, a clear view of how you fit into the people around you, and the willingness to work on the parts that are still thin. Each of those has a skill behind it. **Building Self-Awareness** is what turns a generic list of individual skills into your own. It means telling your natural strengths apart from things you can merely do, by looking at how you work, how the work feels, and what results it produces, and then using feedback to find what you cannot see alone. Without it, any skills list stays borrowed. **Teamwork** is where your individual skills earn their value. It starts with being excellent at your own role and reliable in what you commit to, then asking where the team needs you most. That is how individual strength becomes something colleagues can build on rather than work around. **Building Confidence** is what moves a gap from "not me" to "not yet." Confidence in a specific activity grows by doing it in manageable steps, learning from what goes wrong, and collecting evidence that you can. Pick one thin spot from your inventory and the first small step usually becomes obvious. The Job Skills Test measures all three of these, **alongside nine more work skills that matter in almost any role**, and shows you which ones would make the biggest difference for you right now. It is a quick way to [see which skills to build next](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), so your next step is a specific one rather than a general intention to improve. ## Making it yours Some of this may already sound familiar. Perhaps you are the one who keeps a group project on track, or the colleague people go to when something needs explaining twice. None of these skills is fixed. Whatever your inventory shows today, you can work on it deliberately and still be yourself while you do it, choosing the skills that matter most for where you want to go next. They also tend to carry more weight as your work grows, with bigger projects, more people relying on you, and decisions that land on your desk instead of someone else's. If you have already noticed which kinds of tasks leave you energized and which leave you drained, you have the first piece of evidence a skills profile is built from. ## See where your individual skills stand The only thing left is to see the full picture. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: it takes 7 minutes, covers twelve skills that shape how you manage yourself and work with others, and shows you where you are strong and which skills will make the biggest difference next. ## 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? Individual skills are the capabilities you carry into any job or team. Learn the main types, how they differ from team skills, and how to identify your own. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Teamwork, 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/teamwork.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/individual-skills/ Preferred summary: "Individual skills are the capabilities you carry into any job or team. Learn the main types, how they differ from team skills, and how to identify your own." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.