# 20 Soft Skills, Written as Behaviors You Can Practice and Prove Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/20-soft-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/20-soft-skills.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer 20 soft skills written as everyday behaviors, in ten pairs: what each looks like at work, which ones employers check first, and how to back them up. ## Key facts - Title: 20 Soft Skills, Written as Behaviors You Can Practice and Prove - Category: What Are Soft Skills - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: 20 soft skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/20-soft-skills/ ## What this page covers - 20 soft skills written as everyday behaviors, in ten pairs: what each looks like at work, which ones employers check first, and how to back them up. - Practical guidance for 20 soft skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The 20 soft skills below are behaviors, not adjectives: listening fully, writing emails people can act on, keeping commitments, saying no, asking for feedback, taking initiative and fourteen more. They come in ten pairs, cover both how you work with others and how you manage yourself, and every one can be learned and shown with a real example. That last part is what makes a list useful. A job ad that asks for "strong communication" leaves you guessing what it means on an ordinary workday, and whether you could honestly claim it. Each pair below comes with what it looks like in practice, and the first pair happens to include the skill employers rank highest. ## The 20 soft skills, in ten pairs There is no official count of soft skills; twenty is a practical number, not a standard. What earns an item a place here is that it names something you can do, practice and point to. That rules out two kinds of entry. Character labels such as work ethic, motivation or a positive attitude describe what an employer hopes to see rather than how anyone gets there, so they show up through the behaviors below instead of standing beside them. Thinking skills such as problem-solving and critical thinking matter at work too, but they describe how you reason about a problem, not how you work with people and manage yourself while you solve it, so they belong on a separate list. Each pair traces back to one or two broader skills, named in the entry. ### Skills 1 and 2: Active listening and clear, brief writing Active listening means giving the other person your full attention and understanding their point before you answer it, rather than waiting for a gap to make your own. Clear writing is its partner on the page: put the main point in the first line, keep the message short, include only the recipients who need it, and proofread before you send. Both are part of communication, and writing is the form of it employers screen first: in NACE's Job Outlook 2019 survey, written communication topped the list of attributes employers wanted to see on new graduates' résumés. A useful test for your own emails is whether someone could act on them after reading only the subject line and the first sentence. ### Skills 3 and 4: Speaking up in meetings and acting before you feel ready Speaking up means offering your view, your question or your disagreement while it can still change something, instead of raising it afterward in the hallway. It pairs naturally with acting before you feel ready, which belongs to building confidence. Confidence at work does not arrive first and then make action possible; it is built by acting, one step at a time, while the nerves are still there. Start small: one prepared comment in the next team meeting, then a question in the one after. Each time you speak and the meeting simply carries on, you collect a little evidence that you can do it, and that evidence is what confidence is made of. ### Skills 5 and 6: Keeping commitments and disagreeing constructively Keeping commitments sounds too obvious to list, which is exactly why it carries so much weight: trust on a team is built from small promises kept, like the draft delivered on the day you said or the follow-up email you offered to send. Disagreeing constructively is the harder half. It means raising a concern openly in the discussion, staying on the issue rather than the person, and then, once the team has decided, committing to the decision as if it were your own. Both belong to teamwork, which NACE's 2019 survey placed among the five attributes employers most wanted to see. Grades reward individual work, while most results at work are shared, and these two habits are how you carry your part of them. ### Skills 7 and 8: Showing respect to everyone and being on time and prepared Showing respect means treating the receptionist, the intern and the department head with the same courtesy, speaking about colleagues as if they were in the room, and staying clear of gossip and constant complaining. Being on time and prepared is its most visible form: arriving before the meeting starts, with the document read and a notebook open. Both are professional behaviors, and they are judged early and quietly. According to NACE data cited by the University of Georgia Career Center, professionalism and work ethic rank as the top soft skill employers assess in candidates, and it shows long before any interview question, in small things like arriving early to an information session and taking notes. Much of this pair runs on rules nobody writes down. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work put it this way: > I didn't always know what was considered appropriate, and sometimes I was told that I wasn't behaving in quite the way people expected. > > It was often about very small things: when it was OK to approach a colleague with a question, when you should wait, how much you should interrupt, or when something was important enough to take to your manager. > > I understood that there were unwritten rules about these things — don't interrupt unnecessarily in meetings, don't constantly pull your manager away from what they are doing, and be mindful of other people's time. > > The difficulty was that nobody had given me a handbook for any of it. I knew the informal rules existed, but I didn't yet understand what they were, where the boundaries were, or the spirit behind them. Respect for other people's time is the thread running through what he describes, and once rules like these are named, they can be learned like anything else on this list. ### Skills 9 and 10: Aligning expectations with your manager and bringing solutions with problems Aligning expectations means agreeing with your manager, early and explicitly, what good results look like, what you can decide on your own and what needs their sign-off. Without that conversation, you can work hard on the wrong thing for weeks. Bringing solutions with problems is the everyday habit that follows: when something goes wrong, raise it promptly and arrive with at least one proposed way forward, even a rough one. Both belong to working with your manager, a relationship that works best as a partnership with a common purpose rather than a test of obedience. A regular one-on-one, prepared with a short list of your own questions, is where both habits get practiced. ### Skills 11 and 12: Prioritizing and saying no Prioritizing means separating the important from the merely urgent and putting your best hours into the work that matters most, rather than into whatever arrived last. Before taking on a task, clarify four things: who is asking, what exactly is wanted, when it is due (a real date, not "as soon as possible") and what a finished result looks like. Saying no is the other side of the same skill. Once you have some credibility, declining or renegotiating a request clearly, with a reason and ideally an alternative, protects the commitments you have already made. Both belong to time management, and together they keep "I'm busy" from turning into "I'm behind." ### Skills 13 and 14: Asking for feedback and knowing your strengths Asking for feedback works best when the question is specific and points forward, such as what would make your next report more useful, rather than a general "How am I doing?", and when you listen to the answer before defending yourself. Knowing your strengths means identifying what you are genuinely good at, not merely competent at: the work that goes well, gives you energy and produces results others notice. Both belong to building self-awareness, and together they do something practical for this list. They tell you which of the twenty you can already claim with confidence and which ones you simply have not learned yet. ### Skills 15 and 16: Recovering from setbacks and learning from mistakes Recovering from setbacks starts with sorting what you can control from what you cannot and putting your energy only into the first group. It also means catching the automatic thought that turns one bad meeting into "I'm not cut out for this" and asking whether that thought is actually accurate. Learning from mistakes is the constructive follow-through: analyze what went wrong rather than who is to blame, and check the mistake against reality. Does it happen always, or was it this once? Recovering belongs to building resilience; learning from mistakes is part of building confidence. Between them, a mistake becomes information instead of a verdict. ### Skills 17 and 18: Building relationships before you need them and taking initiative Building relationships before you need them is networking without the transaction: staying in touch with former classmates and colleagues, passing on a useful article or a job opening, and following up within a day after meeting someone new. [Taking initiative](/knowledge/influence/use-your-initiative/) is its counterpart inside your own workplace: asking for the assignment you want, volunteering to draft the agenda or organize the event, and taking an opening when one appears. The worst answer to a request is usually no. Networking and getting and applying influence are the two skills behind this pair, and initiative is on NACE's 2019 list of the five attributes employers most wanted to see. ### Skills 19 and 20: Getting a second opinion and choosing work that fits Getting a second opinion means checking an important decision with someone experienced, ideally someone likely to see it differently, and slowing down when you are rushed or upset. It also rests on knowing your decision-making authority, so you know which calls are yours to make. Choosing work that fits is the long-range version of the same judgment: steering toward roles and tasks that suit your natural strengths and your work values, and letting your direction emerge from experience rather than from a rigid five-year plan or someone else's idea of a good career. The first belongs to decision-making, the second to setting goals. ## Which of the 20 soft skills employers check first All twenty matter over a career, but a handful shape first impressions in hiring. NACE has defined eight [career readiness competencies](/knowledge/employability/career-readiness-skills/) that employers across industries look for in new graduates, whatever their field of study, and communication, the exchange of information, ideas and perspectives with people inside and outside an organization, is one of them. That a core set applies regardless of degree is useful news: the same few soft skills are worth preparing for almost any application. The ranking narrows it further. In NACE's Job Outlook 2019 survey, three of the top five attributes employers wanted to see on a résumé were written communication, teamwork and initiative. On this list, that is skill 2, skills 5 and 6, and skill 18. The other two, problem-solving and analytical skills, are the thinking skills set aside earlier. Add professionalism, which employers rank as the top soft skill they assess, and the starting point is clear: skills 1 and 2, 5 through 8, and initiative are the ones to prepare first. ## How to back up each soft skill with an example [Listing a soft skill](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/how-to-list-soft-skills-on-resume/) tells an employer very little. "Strong communicator" is a claim; the situation behind it is the evidence. The most reliable way to give that evidence is a short story in four parts: the situation, the task, the action you took and the result, often called the STAR structure. For each skill you want to claim, find one specific moment where you used the behavior and one thing it changed. You do not need a full-time job to do this. Group projects, student organizations and part-time jobs are full of these moments: the stalled project you got moving by setting a deadline, the event you helped plan, the shift you covered because you had promised to. A role in a student organization can show how you helped grow membership or got a group to a shared goal, which is teamwork and initiative in a single story. Twenty stories is too many to prepare at once, and you probably do not need them all. Rather than working through the whole list, [pinpoint your biggest gaps](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and put your practice there. Every one of these skills can be learned, so a gap simply marks where to begin. ## The skills behind a strong first impression Look again at the skills employers check first, and three underlying skills keep surfacing: how you put things into words, how you work alongside others, and how you conduct yourself before anyone has asked you a question. **Communication** runs through every application, from the cover letter to the way you answer an interviewer. In practice it is a small set of habits rather than a gift: stating the main point first, listening fully before you reply, choosing a conversation over an email when a topic is sensitive, and keeping messages brief. Each can be practiced in an ordinary week, and each gives you a concrete answer when someone asks how you communicate. **Teamwork** turns "team player," a phrase anyone can write, into something you can show. The skill is putting the team's purpose ahead of your own credit, building trust by doing what you say you will, and engaging in necessary disagreement without making it personal, then backing the decision the team makes. It is not about keeping everyone happy. It is about the shared result, and your reliable part in it. **Professional Behaviors** is the skill employers read before you have said much at all: punctuality, preparation, respect for everyone in the building, and judgment about what is and is not appropriate to say. These are norms, not personality. Nobody has to change who they are to follow them, but somebody usually has to point them out, which is why so many people learn them the slow way. The free **Job Skills Test** [rates you on all three](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), and on the rest with them: every pair above traces back to **twelve skills in all**, and the test covers each one. All of them are learnable, which makes your results a baseline you can improve on rather than a grade. ## Some of these twenty are already yours Read the list again slowly and a few pairs will probably sound like things you already do, under no particular name. If you were the one in a group project who sent the recap email nobody else got around to writing, you practiced clear writing and keeping a commitment in the same move. The pairs that feel far away are not a fixed shortfall. They are behaviors you have not had a reason to practice yet, and you can build them without turning into someone else. They also tend to count for more as your work starts to depend on other people, and their work on you, so knowing now which ones to strengthen first means you will have them ready when that moment comes. ## Find your own place on the list The one step left is to see where you stand. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: it rates you across all twelve skills behind the twenty on this list and shows which ones will make the biggest difference to your applications and your first years at work. It takes 7 minutes. ## 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? 20 soft skills written as everyday behaviors, in ten pairs: what each looks like at work, which ones employers check first, and how to back them up. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Teamwork, Professional Behaviors. ### 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/what-are-soft-skills.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/20-soft-skills/ Preferred summary: "20 soft skills written as everyday behaviors, in ten pairs: what each looks like at work, which ones employers check first, and how to back them up." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.