# Five Soft Skills to Build First, and How to Prove Each One Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/five-soft-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/five-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 The five soft skills to build first are communication, teamwork, professional behaviors, influence and self-awareness. Here's how to show each one to employers. ## Key facts - Title: Five Soft Skills to Build First, and How to Prove Each One - Category: What Are Soft Skills - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: five soft skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/five-soft-skills/ ## What this page covers - The five soft skills to build first are communication, teamwork, professional behaviors, influence and self-awareness. Here's how to show each one to employers. - Practical guidance for five soft skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The five soft skills worth building first are communication, teamwork, professional behaviors, influence and self-awareness. Employers look hardest at the first three, and the last two decide how quickly you grow into a role and whether you can tell which of the five still needs your attention. Five is a sensible number if you are finishing your studies or starting your first job: few enough to actually practice, broad enough to cover both how you work with other people and how you manage yourself. The harder part is knowing which one to start with, and on that question your own judgment is less reliable than it feels. ## Why these five There is no official list of five soft skills. Employer surveys word and group these skills a little differently from year to year (communication split into verbal and written one year, professionalism folded into work ethic another), so the order shifts while the core holds steady. Treat any five-skill list as a way to set priorities, not a ranking to memorize. The core itself is clear. In the Job Outlook 2025 survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), employers placed the ability to work on a team and communication skills, written communication in particular, among the three attributes they most want to see in new graduates. That follows from what entry-level work actually consists of: almost all of it is done with other people, and a large share of it in writing, through email, shared documents and chat. Professional behaviors and influence come next. NACE tracks them as professionalism and leadership, and in its most recent comparison they are the two competencies where new graduates and employers disagree most about how ready graduates are. Self-awareness earns its place for a different reason: it is the skill that tells you where you actually stand on the other four. Together, the five cover both halves of [what soft skills are about](/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-list/), how you work with others and how you manage yourself at work. ## The five soft skills, and what each looks like at work ### 1. Communication Almost everything you do at work reaches other people through what you say and write, which is why employers weigh communication so heavily. It is also a skill most graduates believe they have already mastered. In NACE's 2018 comparison of students and employers, 79.4% of graduating students rated themselves proficient in communication, while only 41.6% of employers said the same about recent graduates. The gap comes from a change of standard. School rewards depth: long, thorough written work. Work rewards almost the opposite: the main point first, short and direct messages, and speaking up when you have something to add. In practice, that means an email whose first line says what you need, a two-sentence answer before the background when your manager asks for an update, and a question asked in the meeting rather than a guess made afterward. You do not need to be outgoing for any of this. These are habits, and they are built one message and one meeting at a time. ### 2. Teamwork Teamwork is the one skill on this list where graduates and employers roughly agree. In NACE's 2018 data, more than three-quarters of employers judged new graduates proficient in teamwork, compared with 85% of students. Group projects explain most of that: they give students real practice and honest feedback from peers, which also makes a group project one of the most credible examples you can bring to an interview. What changes at work is the scale. Teams last longer than a semester, teammates come from different backgrounds, and nobody grades your share separately. The behaviors that count are keeping the commitments you make, sharing what you know without being asked, giving credit to the group, and [backing a team decision](/knowledge/teamwork/disagree-and-commit/) once it is made, even one you argued against. Delivering your own part is necessary, but it is not the whole skill. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work learned that from the other side: > I think I became so focused on getting the work done and making sure everything kept moving that I gradually separated myself from the rest of the team. > > I was constantly thinking about the next task and what needed to be delivered, rather than paying attention to the relationships around me. Looking back, I think that made it much harder for me to really become part of the group. > > I regret that now, because eventually work became so much about pushing through and getting things done that I neglected the human relationships that are also essential to making a workplace function well. > > That is something I really want to learn from. I don't want to end up being the person who sits alone in a corner, focused only on the work, and eventually burns out. He is describing a trap that is easy to fall into when you are eager to prove yourself: the tasks get done, but the trust that makes the next task easier never gets built. ### 3. Professional behaviors Employers call this professionalism, and it shows the widest gap of all. In NACE's 2018 comparison, 89.4% of graduating students considered themselves proficient in professionalism and work ethic, while only 42.5% of employers agreed about recent graduates. Professional behavior is made of small, everyday conduct that is judged over weeks rather than graded once: arriving on time, treating the receptionist with the same respect as the director, taking a genuine interest in what colleagues work on, thanking people who helped you, keeping complaints in proportion, and finishing the dull administrative tasks without fuss. Almost nobody gives students feedback on this before they start work, so the gaps stay invisible to the person who has them. It is not a dress code or a rulebook. It is a set of attitudes (respect, humility, follow-through) that colleagues notice long before they see your best work. Some would call it common sense, but common sense is not common practice, which is exactly why it belongs among the five. ### 4. Influence Employers call this leadership, and at the start of a career it has little to do with managing people. It is influence without a title: becoming someone whose ideas get a hearing and whose requests get a yes. NACE's comparison of its Job Outlook 2025 employer ratings with its 2024 student survey found leadership among the widest gaps between how graduates see themselves and how employers see them. At entry level, influence is built in small, visible steps. Deliver what you promised, consistently, until people start to rely on it. Volunteer for the tasks that shape a discussion, such as drafting the agenda or writing the summary. Ask for the assignment you want; the worst answer is no. And before you pitch an idea, work out what the other person gains from it. None of this waits for a promotion. A first-year employee can start on all four in the first month. ### 5. Self-awareness The fifth skill is the one that makes the other four usable. Graduates' ratings of their own soft skills run consistently higher than employers' ratings, so your own sense of which skills you have is not a reliable guide on its own. Self-awareness means building a more accurate picture: knowing what you are naturally good at, spotting your blind spots, and actively looking for feedback that shows you what you cannot see yourself. The most useful feedback comes from people who have watched you work, such as a supervisor, a teammate or a lecturer who saw your group project. Ask them specific, forward-looking questions ("What should I do differently in the next presentation?") rather than "How am I doing?" Specific questions get specific answers, and specific answers are the ones you can act on. ## How to prove the five soft skills instead of listing them Writing "excellent communicator" on a [resume](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/how-to-list-soft-skills-on-resume/) proves very little. Employers test soft skills mainly through [behavioral interview questions](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/interpersonal-skills-interview/) that begin with "Tell me about a time when…", and they expect a specific past example, often in a Situation, Task, Action, Result (STAR) structure. A claim without a story carries almost no weight. The obstacle is usually not a lack of experience but a lack of translation. NACE's president and CEO, Shawn VanDerziel, has attributed part of the gap between graduates' and employers' ratings to students not seeing how their college experiences relate to the competencies employers look for. So make that link explicit, one skill at a time: - Communication: a time you explained something complex to people outside your field, or turned a long piece of work into a short summary that someone acted on. - Teamwork: a group project where you kept a commitment under pressure, settled a disagreement, or picked up work that was falling through the cracks. - Professional behaviors: a job or volunteer role where you were trusted with something (keys, cash, confidential information, a difficult customer) because you had shown you were reliable. - Influence: a moment you took the initiative, proposed a change and got others to go along with it. - Self-awareness: feedback you asked for, what it told you, and what you did differently afterward. One honest story with a result beats five adjectives. And if a skill leaves you without any story at all, that is useful information too: it is probably the one to work on. ## Which one to start with Every number in this article describes graduates as a group, not you. What the numbers do tell you is that self-ratings tend to run high, so the skill you feel surest about deserves a second look rather than a pass. That says nothing bad about you. These skills are rarely taught before work begins, so almost everyone starts a career with some of them still to learn. A sensible order is to begin where a gap costs the most, with communication and teamwork, which you will use in every role and every week. Then apply the story test from the previous section: the skill you could not find an example for is your most likely gap. Finally, check your choice with one person who has watched you work, because they can often see in a single conversation what might take you months to notice. Before you commit to one, you can also run [a structured skills check](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) so the choice rests on more than a gut feeling; whatever it shows is a skill you can build, not a fixed part of who you are. Then pick one skill and practice it on purpose for a few weeks before moving to the next. Steady work on one skill beats scattered worry about five. ## Three you can start practicing before your first day Look back over the five and three of them stand out for a simple reason: none of them needs a job title, years of experience or anyone's permission. They are built in ordinary moments that a student or new hire already has. **Communication** is where most early gains hide in small mechanics: putting your request in the first line of an email, giving the short answer before the background, saying in a meeting that you did not follow instead of nodding along. Presentation polish can wait; these everyday moves are what colleagues notice first. **Teamwork**. In a group project or a part-time job, the skill shows in whether people can count on you: doing what you said by when you said it, passing on what you know, and letting the team share the credit. It is a contributor's skill, built long before anyone asks you to lead a team. **Professional Behaviors** are the part of your reputation that forms before anyone has seen your work: being on time, treating everyone with the same respect, showing interest in what colleagues do. There is no rulebook to memorize, only a handful of attitudes you can start showing at your next shift, seminar or interview. Your results on these three, set beside influence, self-awareness and the seven other skills that make up the **twelve work skills** the free **Job Skills Test** measures, show you [which strengths to lead with](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) when you write applications and prepare interview stories. Each of them can be learned, so the lower scores simply mark where practice will pay off most. ## What you already bring Chances are a few of these five already show up in your week, just without a label on them. If you are the one who sends the recap message after a group meeting so nobody has to guess who does what, that one habit is communication and teamwork at once. The skills that feel further away are mostly ones you have had little chance to rehearse, and building them changes what you do, not who you are. A gap in any of the five gets harder to hide as your work becomes more visible, and easier to close the earlier you spot it. ## Find your own five From here, the list only becomes useful once it is about you. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. In 7 minutes, it shows where you stand on all twelve, the five in this article among them, and which ones would do the most for your applications and your first years at work. ## 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? The five soft skills to build first are communication, teamwork, professional behaviors, influence and self-awareness. Here's how to show each one to employers. ### 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/five-soft-skills/ Preferred summary: "The five soft skills to build first are communication, teamwork, professional behaviors, influence and self-awareness. Here's how to show each one to employers." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.