# How to Explain Soft Skills: What They Are and How to Show Yours Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/explain-soft-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/explain-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 Soft skills are the nontechnical skills behind how you work with others and manage yourself. Here's how to explain them clearly and show your own with evidence. ## Key facts - Title: How to Explain Soft Skills: What They Are and How to Show Yours - Category: What Are Soft Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Communication, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: explain soft skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/explain-soft-skills/ ## What this page covers - Soft skills are the nontechnical skills behind how you work with others and manage yourself. Here's how to explain them clearly and show your own with evidence. - Practical guidance for explain soft skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation The shortest way to explain soft skills: they are the nontechnical skills that govern how you deal with other people at work and how you handle yourself, such as explaining an idea clearly, pulling your weight in a team, keeping your commitments and recovering after a setback. Hard skills are what you know how to do. Soft skills are how you do it. You are expected to understand the term long before anyone defines it for you. It sits in module descriptions and on application forms, and it comes up when an interviewer asks [which soft skills you would bring](/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/most-important-soft-skills/). Yet the moment you try to put it into your own words, it tends to dissolve into adjectives like "good with people." The explanation gets much easier once you stop treating soft skills as one fuzzy category. They split cleanly into two kinds, and the same split shows you how to prove the ones you have. ## How to explain soft skills: two kinds and one contrast A useful map comes from a U.S. National Research Council committee. In its 2012 report *Education for Life and Work*, it sorted the skills people need for school, work and life into three domains: cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal. The cognitive domain covers knowledge and reasoning, the ground most hard skills stand on. The other two are what is usually meant by soft skills, which gives you an explanation you can repeat in one breath: soft skills are the skills for working with others and the skills for managing yourself. ### Interpersonal skills: working with others This is the side most people picture first. The National Research Council places communication, collaboration, responsibility and conflict resolution in the interpersonal domain, and what these have in common is that they exist in the exchange between you and someone else. In the framework Headway uses, this side includes communication, teamwork, working with your manager and professional behaviors: the respect, punctuality and discretion colleagues expect without ever stating them. Explained properly, an interpersonal skill is never a personality description. "Good communicator" is a label. Putting the main point first in an email, letting the other person finish before you answer, telling a teammate early that a deadline will slip: those are the behaviors the label is supposed to stand for, and they are what other people actually notice. ### Intrapersonal skills: managing yourself The second kind is harder to see because it operates inside you. The National Research Council includes self-direction, conscientiousness and metacognition, the ability to reflect on your own learning and adjust it. In everyday working terms, this is how you handle yourself: knowing your strengths and blind spots, building confidence by acting before you feel ready, [bouncing back after criticism](/knowledge/self-awareness/handle-criticism/), organizing your time so that commitments are actually kept. Nobody watches these skills directly; they show up in results. You see them in the person who delivers what they promised, who changes their approach after a mistake instead of repeating it, who stays steady after a sharp comment. They also carry real weight. Of all the interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies the National Research Council reviewed, conscientiousness (staying organized, responsible and hardworking) was the one most closely linked to good educational, career and health outcomes. An explanation of soft skills that stops at getting along with others leaves out half the picture, and arguably the half that makes you dependable. ### Hard skills: the contrast category Soft skills are easiest to explain against what they are not. Hard skills are the technical, teachable abilities a particular job requires, such as bookkeeping rules, a programming language or a lab procedure. You gain them through education or training, and they are relatively easy to measure with an exam or a piece of work. The two do not compete. Hard skills cover what you can do; soft skills decide whether that ability turns into good work alongside other people. One difference matters a lot early in a career: hard skills belong to a particular profession, while soft skills carry over to almost any role and industry. That is why a group project, a weekend job in a café or a volunteer role counts as genuine evidence of soft skills, even when it has nothing to do with the field you want to enter. ## Why soft skills are hard to pin down If the term still feels slippery, that is not a gap in your understanding. A 2011 National Research Council workshop summary concluded that definitive labels and definitions for the interpersonal skills that matter in school and work remain elusive, and that the many competing names reflect skills that mix attitudes, behavior and thinking. The vocabulary itself is unsettled. There is a second reason. Much of what soft skills cover is [never said out loud at work](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/office-etiquette/), so people often discover the rules only by running into them. > I worried about whether I would be able to do the job well enough. What if there was something I couldn't figure out — could I ask someone, or would I be left very much to myself? I also worried that there would be 'unspoken' things I ought to know: abbreviations and jargon in programs and systems, and norms — how people act toward each other, how much you're allowed to ask for help, when people eat lunch, and the email culture. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, and the wording is our notes of what she told us rather than a transcript. Look at the mix in her list. Jargon and system abbreviations can be picked up from a colleague or a glossary in a minute. How people treat each other, and how much help it is acceptable to ask for, are written down nowhere. That unwritten part is the soft-skill side, and it is exactly why the category is so hard to explain from the outside. The remedy for both problems is the same: explain each soft skill through the behavior it produces, never through its label alone. And because the National Research Council committee treats these competencies as malleable, changing with experience, education and deliberate effort, a soft skill you cannot yet show is not a flaw in who you are. It is a behavior you have not practiced yet, and you can learn it while staying entirely yourself. ## Why soft skills weigh as much as what you studied Hard skills are often what gets you through the door: the degree, the certificate, the software you know. After that, nearly every piece of work passes through other people and through your own habits. A report has to be explained, a deadline negotiated, a correction taken on board without losing momentum. That is why soft skills count at least as much as hard skills when you are hired, and why their weight grows as your responsibilities do. They also do not go out of date when a tool or a system changes, which makes them the part of your skill set that moves with you from job to job. ## How to explain your own soft skills When the question becomes personal, on an application, in an interview or in a reflection assignment, the same rule applies with more force. Soft skills are hard to judge [from a résumé alone](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/how-to-list-soft-skills-on-resume/), which is why employers look for them in examples and in how you behave. "Team player" gives an interviewer nothing to evaluate, because anyone can write it. What works is a short account in three parts: the situation, what you specifically did, and what changed as a result. "In a five-person project, I set up a fifteen-minute weekly check-in after two deadlines slipped, and we handed in the final report a day early" explains teamwork and communication better than any adjective could. Because soft skills transfer, the situation does not have to come from a job in your field. A part-time job, a sports team, a student association or a group assignment all work, as long as the behavior was yours and the result was real. The harder step comes first: deciding which soft skills to describe at all. It is easy to overrate the skills you enjoy and to overlook the ones you use without noticing. If you are unsure what to call what you already do, the Job Skills Test [puts names to your strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), skill by skill, which gives you something far sharper to explain than a string of adjectives. ## What turns a vague explanation into a convincing one Look back at what each explanation above depended on: an honest view of what you actually do, clear words for it, and a feel for the unspoken norms that make behavior read as professional. None of that comes from a definition. **Building Self-Awareness** is where your own explanation begins. You cannot describe soft skills you have never noticed in yourself, and the ones you use most are often the hardest to see. Paying attention to which tasks come easily and leave you energized, and asking a teammate or supervisor for one specific piece of feedback on what you could do differently, turns a vague impression into a short list you can back up, blind spots included. **Communication** is both the soft skill most explanations start with and the one you need to explain all the others. Broken into behaviors, it becomes concrete: listening fully before replying, leading with the main point, keeping it brief, adjusting to the person in front of you. The same habits make your own answer about soft skills land: main point first, one example, then stop. None of it requires being outgoing; it is practice, not charisma. **Professional Behaviors** cover the part of soft skills that nobody spells out: giving everyone the same respect regardless of role, being on time, speaking about colleagues as if they were in the room, steering clear of chronic complaining or arrogance. They show most clearly why soft skills differ from hard ones, since they are rarely taught, yet colleagues form an impression from them early. Seen as a handful of visible signals rather than a rulebook, they become easy to explain and easy to practice. If you want to know which of these three already works in your favor and which needs practice, the **free Job Skills Test** [scores each one separately](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), alongside the rest of the twelve work skills it measures, and because every one of them is learnable, a low score only marks where to begin. ## The raw material is already in your week Parts of this may already sound like a description of your own habits. If you are the one who sends a short summary after a group meeting so everyone knows who is doing what, you are using communication and reliability at once, and that is exactly the kind of example an interviewer can weigh. The skills you have not built yet are not missing pieces of your personality. They are next on a list you get to set, starting with the ones that matter most for the work you want. Left unnamed, those gaps tend to cost more as your work involves more people and more responsibility; once named, they are simply where your practice begins. ## Put your own soft skills on the map Explaining soft skills in general is the easy half; the useful half is knowing which ones you can already point to. The **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your work skills that takes 7 minutes. You get a score for each of the twelve skills and a clear view of which few would change the most for you if you worked on them 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? Soft skills are the nontechnical skills behind how you work with others and manage yourself. Here's how to explain them clearly and show your own with evidence. ### 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/explain-soft-skills/ Preferred summary: "Soft skills are the nontechnical skills behind how you work with others and manage yourself. Here's how to explain them clearly and show your own with evidence." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.