# Skill List: The 8 Skills Employers Recognize and How to Back Them Up Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/skill-list/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/skill-list.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 A skill list for students and graduates: NACE's eight career readiness competencies, what employers look for, and how to back each skill with an example. ## Key facts - Title: Skill List: The 8 Skills Employers Recognize and How to Back Them Up - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: skill list - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/skill-list/ ## What this page covers - A skill list for students and graduates: NACE's eight career readiness competencies, what employers look for, and how to back each skill with an example. - Practical guidance for skill list - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation A skill list is an inventory of what you can do: technical skills tied to a job, plus the interpersonal and self-management skills that show how you work. For graduates, the closest thing to a standard version is NACE's eight career readiness competencies. Each entry needs a real example behind it. Finding a list is the easy part. Deciding which entries honestly describe you, and naming them in words an employer will believe, is harder, especially when your work experience feels thin. The evidence is usually there. It just tends to sit in places you wouldn't think to call work. ## What employers look for on a skill list Technical skills are the easier half to pin down. They belong to a particular kind of work and can be taught and checked: a programming language, a software package, a lab method, a foreign language, bookkeeping. Interpersonal and self-management skills make up the other half. They describe how you communicate, cooperate, manage your own work and take initiative. The first half shows what you can do; the second shows how you will do it alongside other people. A useful skill list needs both. Employers hiring graduates pay close attention to the second half. With little work history to judge, they look for signs of how you will handle unfamiliar problems and work with others. That makes your list more than a formality: about 65% of employers in NACE's Job Outlook 2025 survey use [skills-based hiring](/knowledge/types-of-skills/skills-based-approach/) for entry-level roles, screening candidates on demonstrated skills rather than relying mainly on their degree or major. In many applications, the skills you name and the evidence you attach to them are what the first screen reads. ## A skill list employers recognize: NACE's eight competencies NACE, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, defines career readiness through eight competencies. It is the closest thing graduates have to a shared skill list, with a vocabulary that both career centers and employers recognize. NACE intends the eight to be used in any combination, so treat them as categories to check your own list against, not boxes you must tick. Here is what each one looks like in practice, and where your evidence is likely to come from. ### 1. Communication Communication covers the writing and talking that work runs on: messages, reports, updates, and conversations with colleagues and customers. On its own, the word tells an employer very little. What they want to know is which kind you have practiced, and where. "Wrote the weekly progress update for a five-person project group" or "handled phone inquiries at a busy front desk" answers that question and gives an interviewer something concrete to ask about. Written and spoken examples both count, so if you can, name one of each. ### 2. Teamwork Almost 80% of employers in NACE's Job Outlook 2025 survey look for teamwork on student résumés. That makes it one of the most valuable entries on your list, and one of the easiest to undersell with a vague label. Employers are not asking whether you get along with people. They want evidence that you pull your weight in a group and help it reach a result. Group projects are the obvious source, but a sports team, a student society committee or a shift at a café count just as much, provided you can say what you contributed to the group's result. ### 3. Critical Thinking In the same survey, nearly 90% of employers said they look for evidence of problem-solving on student résumés. Critical thinking is the competency behind it: working out what the real problem is, weighing the options and arriving at something that works when the answer is not in a textbook. Your evidence is any situation that called for exactly that. The experiment that failed and had to be redesigned, the scheduling clash you sorted out for a volunteer group, the customer complaint no script covered: describe the problem, what you did and how it turned out. ### 4. Professionalism Professionalism covers reliability, punctuality, accountability and a consistent work ethic. When there is little work history to go on, it is how an employer judges what you will be like on an ordinary working day. Adjectives such as "hard-working" or "dependable" prove nothing by themselves, but the record behind them can: two years at the same part-time job, a role where you were trusted to open up or handle the cash, a deadline you met in the middle of exam season. Those details do the convincing for you. ### 5. Leadership On a graduate's skill list, leadership does not have to mean managing people. At entry level, it means [taking initiative](/knowledge/teamwork/teamwork-and-leadership-examples/) and moving work forward with others before anyone gives you a title: proposing a better way to split a group assignment, organizing an event for a student society, showing a new colleague the ropes because nobody else had time. That reading matters if you have assumed you have nothing to put here. If you started something nobody asked for and others joined in, it belongs on the list. ### 6. Technology NACE describes the technology competency as understanding and using technologies ethically to work more efficiently, complete tasks and reach goals. The focus is on using tools to get work done, not on being a specialist, so almost every role has a technology side. This is also where the job-specific tools on your list belong, named precisely. "Data analysis in R" or "video editing in Premiere Pro" can be checked; "computer skills" cannot. Match the tools you list to the ones the job ad names, and include only those you could use tomorrow without a tutorial. ### 7. Career & Self-Development Career and self-development covers knowing your own strengths and gaps, seeking out feedback, and building the professional relationships that help you grow. It sounds less like a job skill than the others, but it is the competency that keeps the rest of your list moving. The evidence is more ordinary than you might expect: asking a supervisor what you could do better, taking a course to close a gap you noticed, staying in touch with a former manager or lecturer who now acts as a reference. ### 8. Equity & Inclusion Equity and inclusion covers working respectfully and effectively with people whose backgrounds, cultures and perspectives differ from yours. Workplaces bring together people of different ages, nationalities, disciplines and experience, and employers want to know you can make that mix work. A mixed international project group, a customer-facing job, or tutoring students from a different background are all places this shows. The evidence is what you did to help the group function: changing how you explained something, making sure quieter members were heard, dividing tasks so everyone could contribute. ## How to make the skill list your own Eight competencies give you a vocabulary, not a résumé. Turning them into your own list starts with the job and ends with the evidence. Start with the job ad. The skills an employer wants are usually named in the ad itself, so choose the competencies that match the role and save the rest for another application. A short list matched to the job does more than a long one that could belong to anyone. Then put evidence behind every entry. Each skill you list is a claim an interviewer can test, usually with some version of "[Tell me about a time when](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/soft-skills-interview-questions/)…". Labels like "team player" or "excellent communicator" carry no weight on their own; a situation and a result do. A skill without an example isn't ready for the list yet, though often the example exists and simply hasn't been noticed. Look for that evidence well beyond [formal work experience](/knowledge/types-of-skills/define-transferable-skills/). Coursework, group projects, a thesis, part-time and student jobs, volunteering, sports and student organizations all produce moments where you used a skill and can name a result. The practical method is to list those situations first and only then name the skills they show. Working the other way round, from a list of skill names to your memory, makes it easy to sell yourself short. > 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. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, and her point carries straight over to your list. What you are studying right now is current, and the methods you use every week count as evidence too. If you can find the examples but still can't tell which competencies are genuinely strong for you, [a neutral read on your skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) is a useful check before you decide what to claim, and any gap it shows is one you can close with practice. ## The skills behind a list you can defend Look at what a convincing list has that a copied one lacks. Its owner knows which entries are genuinely theirs, can say them plainly, and can show how they work with other people. Two of the skills behind those qualities already appeared among NACE's eight. Here they come back as skills you build rather than labels you claim, along with the one that sits underneath both. **Building Self-Awareness** is what lets you mark which entries on a list are really yours. The useful line runs between natural strengths, the things you do well and come away energized by, and skills you are merely competent at. Both can go on a list, but the strengths are the ones you will talk about with conviction. Specific feedback sharpens the picture: ask a supervisor or teammate what you did well on one particular project, and you may hear about a strength you had overlooked, or learn that a claim needs more evidence than you thought. **Communication** is the entry that is easiest to write and hardest to back up, because as a single word it says nothing. As a skill, it breaks into parts you can practice and point to: putting your main point first, being clear and brief, adapting to the person in front of you, listening fully before you answer, writing an email that needs no follow-up, disagreeing without damaging the relationship. The parts you already do well become specific entries; the next one to practice becomes your plan. **Teamwork** is easy to claim and easy to doubt, since a group project seems to qualify anyone. What makes it credible is a handful of behaviors: doing what you said you would, sharing what you know, giving the group credit for the result, disagreeing without making it personal, and then committing to a decision you argued against. Each one is something you can point to from a course, a job or a volunteer role, or start practicing on purpose in the next one. Not one of these three is fixed, and the same goes for every skill on your list. To find out which to work on first, the **free Job Skills Test** [shows which skills to build next](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/): it measures these three alongside nine other work skills that turn up in almost every role, and each of them improves with practice. ## What the gaps on your list mean Read back through the eight and some will probably sound like things you already do, perhaps more of them than you would have put on paper. If you once rebuilt a group project's timeline so everyone knew what was due and when, that one moment is evidence for communication, teamwork and leadership at the same time. The entries you can't fill yet say nothing fixed about who you are. They are skills you haven't had the chance to practice, and you can build them in your own way without becoming someone else. Each new role puts more of your results in other people's hands, so these entries only grow in value, and knowing where you stand now gives you a head start. What you need next is a clear view of your starting point. ## Start your list from an honest read Everything above works better once you know where you begin. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment covering twelve work skills that matter in almost any role. In 7 minutes, it shows which of your skills are strong enough to list with confidence today and which would make the biggest difference to develop 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? A skill list for students and graduates: NACE's eight career readiness competencies, what employers look for, and how to back each skill with an example. ### 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/skill-list/ Preferred summary: "A skill list for students and graduates: NACE's eight career readiness competencies, what employers look for, and how to back each skill with an example." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.