# All Soft Skills: The Twelve That Matter at Work and How They Fit Together Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/all-soft-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/all-soft-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 There is no official list of all soft skills. Here are the twelve that matter at work, how they group, and how to find out which ones you already have. ## Key facts - Title: All Soft Skills: The Twelve That Matter at Work and How They Fit Together - Category: What Are Soft Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Communication, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: all soft skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/all-soft-skills/ ## What this page covers - There is no official list of all soft skills. Here are the twelve that matter at work, how they group, and how to find out which ones you already have. - Practical guidance for all soft skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation There is no official list of all soft skills, but the set is smaller than it looks. Soft skills are the nontechnical skills that shape how you work with others and how you manage yourself at work, and those that count most come down to twelve: from communication and teamwork to self-awareness, confidence and resilience. If the whole idea has always felt vague, as though everyone else got a manual you never saw, there is a reason. These skills are [mostly unspoken rules](/knowledge/types-of-skills/real-world-skills/), rarely taught in school or by employers, so most people pick them up by trial and error. That also means they can be [learned on purpose](/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/train-soft-skills/). The first step is knowing what kind of skill you are looking at, and every skill that gets the label falls into one of just three kinds. ## All soft skills fall into two groups, plus one that gets mixed in "Soft skills" is an umbrella term, and it gets stretched over several different kinds of capability, which is why no list of them is ever final. The more useful question is not how many soft skills there are, but what kinds there are. The National Research Council's 2012 report *Education for Life and Work* gives a clear answer: it sorts the competencies people need for work and life into three domains, interpersonal, intrapersonal and cognitive. Each covers a different kind of capability (relating to others, managing yourself, and thinking), and the first two are where soft skills live. ### Interpersonal skills: working with other people This is the group most people picture when they hear the term. The National Research Council places complex communication, social skills, teamwork, [cultural sensitivity](/knowledge/people-skills/intercultural-skills/) and dealing with diversity here. It also notes that this domain had no counterpart in Bloom's taxonomy, the classic classification of educational objectives, so it had to be added rather than borrowed. That small detail fits a larger pattern: the skills of working with others have rarely been part of what education sets out to teach. At work, six skills make up this group: - Communication: getting your point across clearly and briefly, listening properly, and speaking up when it matters. - Teamwork: putting the team's purpose ahead of your own credit, doing what you said you would, and disagreeing without making it personal. - Working with Your Manager: treating the relationship as a partnership, agreeing on what good results look like, and bringing solutions along with problems. - Professional Behaviors: the unwritten conduct of a workplace, from showing everyone the same respect to keeping out of gossip. - Networking: building relationships before you need them and helping people without keeping score. - Getting and Applying Influence: changing minds through earned credibility, initiative and careful preparation rather than authority. ### Intrapersonal skills: managing yourself The second domain points inward. The National Research Council groups self-management, time management, self-development and self-regulation here: the skills of steering your own behavior, reactions and growth. This half deserves equal attention, because soft skills are not only people skills. How you handle a setback, a week with three deadlines or a piece of criticism belongs to the same set as how you handle a colleague. At work, six skills make up this group: - Building Self-Awareness: knowing what you are naturally good at, recognizing your blind spots, and asking for feedback that tells you what to do next. - Setting Goals: finding work that fits your strengths and values, and letting your direction emerge from experience rather than from a rigid long-term plan. - Building Confidence: trusting yourself to act, built by taking on challenges in manageable steps instead of waiting until you feel ready. - Building Resilience: recovering from setbacks by focusing on what you can control and questioning the thoughts that turn one mistake into a disaster. - Time Management: clarifying what is actually being asked, putting important work ahead of merely urgent work, and saying no when you need to. - Decision-Making: knowing what you are authorized to decide, getting a second opinion, and avoiding traps such as looking only for information that confirms what you already think. ### Cognitive skills: thinking, which belongs elsewhere The third domain covers thinking and knowledge: [critical thinking](/knowledge/decision-making/critical-thinking-skills/), problem solving and reasoning. The term "soft skills" is often stretched to cover these too, which is a large part of why it can feel so shapeless. Thinking skills matter at work, but they describe how you reason, not how you deal with people or manage yourself, so they are best kept apart from soft skills. Where judgment meets everyday working life (what you may decide, whom to involve, which traps to watch for), it is already covered by decision-making. Put together, that is the whole picture: six skills for working with others and six for managing yourself, every one of them a learnable behavior rather than a fixed trait. ## Why employers weigh soft skills so heavily These skills are not a garnish on top of your qualifications. In a 2017 iCIMS survey of 400 HR and recruiting professionals, 94% said an employee with stronger soft skills has a better chance of being promoted to a leadership position. The reason lies in how a job changes as you move up: less of it is doing tasks yourself, and more of it is getting results with and through other people. That makes soft skills less a hiring formality than an investment that keeps paying off. Employers say the same at the hiring stage. In a 2021 Harris Poll survey for Express Employment Professionals, 73% of companies said they value soft skills more than ever before. And when ADP surveyed more than 1,500 business owners and hiring managers in 2024, as CNBC reported, the top skill they were hiring for was work ethic, which was also among the hardest to find; problem-solving, time management and communication were on their list too. What employers name first, in other words, is often not a technical competence but a pattern of everyday conduct: arriving prepared, following through, and managing your own work without being chased. The weight of this side of work is easy to underestimate from outside, because so little of it is ever written down. > In our studies, we read a great deal about leadership, organizations, employees, and HR, and all of that is useful. But it doesn't always feel entirely representative of what actually happens in the real world. > > Textbooks often describe organizations in terms of systems, structures, and fairly clear-cut frameworks. But once I entered working life, I realized that much of organizational life is actually shaped by human relationships and human behavior. > > The systems and structures are there to hold things together, but it is people who make the organization work in practice. In that sense, the human side of working life carries far more weight than I had expected. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work told us that, looking back on what consulting work had taught him. He is not dismissing his studies, which he calls useful; the human side was simply the part no textbook had prepared him for. ## How to work out which soft skills you already have A list of names cannot tell you which skills you have, which you lack, or where to start. The two groups can, because each tells you what a skill is for and where it gets tested. Skills for working with others show up in shared work: how a disagreement in a project team played out, whether people come back to you for help, how a conversation with a supervisor landed. Skills for managing yourself show up under pressure: the week everything was due at once, the rejection email, the feedback you did not want to hear. For each of the twelve, look for one real moment, from your studies, a part-time job or an internship, where you used it. Solid evidence marks a strength. No evidence, or a memory that makes you wince, marks something to work on. If that second pile is bigger than you would like, you are in the expected position, not behind. A 2024 study in *Humanities and Social Sciences Communications* found that employers' demand for soft skills coincides with a gap in how graduates are trained in them. A gap that comes from what was never taught is one you can close, because these are behaviors you learn, not a personality you either have or lack. Memory is a selective judge of your own skills, though, so it pays to check your sorting against something more structured: a short, free assessment can [pinpoint your real gaps](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). ## Three skills that make the map work for you The map only becomes useful once you can place yourself on it, and once you can see the rules other people seem to follow without thinking. Three of the twelve sit closest to that. **Building Self-Awareness** is what turns a map of skills into a map of you. It means noticing what you are naturally good at rather than merely competent at, catching the blind spots in how others see you, and asking for specific, forward-looking feedback instead of waiting for a verdict. It is not about personality types, and it is not about compiling weaknesses to fix. The point is seeing clearly which strengths you can build on and where the real gaps are. **Communication** is the skill most people name first, and much of the rest leans on it: teamwork, working with a manager and influence all run through it. It also shows what a soft skill really is. Not a gift for being articulate, but a set of concrete habits: putting your main point first, keeping it clear and brief, choosing a conversation over an email when a topic is sensitive or complex, and speaking up rather than waiting to be asked. **Professional Behaviors** cover the part of soft skills that nobody spells out: treating everyone with the same respect, showing humility and genuine interest, expressing appreciation, and avoiding the habits that quietly erode goodwill, such as staying passive, complaining constantly or talking about people behind their backs. None of this is a judgment of character. They are common missteps, and they can be learned and unlearned like anything else. An honest outside view is the hardest part of self-awareness to get on your own. The free Job Skills Test offers one: it looks at these three alongside **nine other workplace skills** and shows which are [already strengths to build on](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), so you start from what works and treat the rest as skills you have yet to learn. ## Where you already show up on the map Some of the twelve may read less like new skills than like descriptions of how you already operate. If you are the one who checks that everyone left a meeting with the same next steps, or who confirms a deadline before agreeing to it, you already have evidence for communication and time management. The skills that feel further away are not a verdict; they are behaviors you have not had much reason to practice yet, and you can build them while staying entirely yourself. Each new team, project or step up hands more of the outcome to these skills, which makes an early start worth more than a late one, and finding out where you stand is the easy part. ## See where you stand across all twelve What is left is to see the map with your own results on it. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it shows where you stand on all twelve soft skills and which ones would make the biggest difference for you right now. ## 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? There is no official list of all soft skills. Here are the twelve that matter at work, how they group, and how to find out which ones you already have. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Communication, 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/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.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/all-soft-skills/ Preferred summary: "There is no official list of all soft skills. Here are the twelve that matter at work, how they group, and how to find out which ones you already have." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.