The Most Important Soft Skills, and the Ones You Might Be Overrating

The most important soft skills, judged by what employers rate highest year after year, are communication and teamwork. Close behind come professional behaviors, sound decision-making and taking initiative. Which one matters most for you, though, depends less on any ranking than on where your own gap sits, and that gap is harder to see than it sounds.

If you are close to graduating or a year or two into work, you have likely been told these skills decide who gets hired and who moves up, without anyone saying which to work on first. The data holds a useful twist: the skills new graduates feel surest about are the very ones where employers see the biggest shortfalls.

The most important soft skills, according to employers

Ask employers what they want from new graduates and the same core keeps returning. In NACE’s Job Outlook 2011 survey, verbal communication topped the soft skills employers sought, followed by work ethic, teamwork, analytical skills and initiative. In Job Outlook 2014, the ability to work in a team scored highest of all candidate attributes, at 4.55 on a five-point importance scale, with verbal communication right behind at 4.48.

The exact order moves from one survey to the next, partly because the categories are worded and grouped differently: “verbal communication” one year, “written communication” another. So read the six below as a stable core, not a league table to memorize. Each entry pairs what employers report with what the skill looks like in your daily work, and with how often new graduates fall short of it.

1. Communication

Communication sits at or near the top of almost every employer ranking because it is the channel through which everything else you do becomes visible. A good idea you cannot explain, or a problem you never mention, simply does not count at work.

It is also where employers see a real shortfall. In NACE’s Job Outlook 2022, employers rated communication as highly important, yet only 54.3% rated new graduates very or extremely proficient in it. One reason is the shift in what good communication means. In education it is mostly written and rewarded for depth; at work it is rewarded for being clear, brief and direct, with the main point first. It also means speaking up when you have something useful to add, and listening fully before you answer. None of that requires being a natural talker. It is a set of habits, and habits can be practiced.

2. Teamwork

Teamwork is the attribute employers rated highest in Job Outlook 2014, and it is also where graduates and employers agree most. More than three-quarters of employers judged new graduates proficient in teamwork, compared with 85 percent of students, according to NACE. Group projects give students real practice and real feedback here, which is why the gap is smaller than for the other skills on this list.

What changes at work is who you are teaming with. Colleagues come from different fields, carry different priorities and are not assigned to you for one semester. If you have ever worked on a project where you and a teammate seemed to be solving two different problems, you will recognize this. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work offered a piece of advice we keep coming back to:

If you’re hired somewhere with people from a completely different academic background, expect them not to think the way you do. It’s not that they’re stupid or doing it on purpose — they just don’t know how you think.

Her point is a teamwork habit in disguise: assume good faith, then close the gap yourself. Add reliability (doing what you committed to), sharing knowledge and credit freely, and backing a team decision once it is made, even one you argued against, and you have most of what employers mean by the word.

3. Professional behaviors

Employers call this professionalism, and it holds the largest perception gap NACE found between graduates and employers: nearly 90 percent of graduating seniors believed they were proficient, but fewer than half of employers agreed. The reason is that professional behavior is made mostly of unwritten norms (being on time, treating everyone with the same respect, keeping complaints in proportion, handling confidential information carefully, finishing the dull administrative tasks without fuss). Students rarely get feedback on any of it before they start work, so it feels obvious right up until someone points out what was missed.

The work ethic that ranked second in the 2011 survey lives here too: being someone who shows up, follows through and does not need chasing. The good news is that these norms are learnable rules of a setting, not a personality. Knowing them before your first week puts you ahead of the learn-by-mistake route most people take.

4. Decision-making

Employers in the NACE surveys file this under critical thinking. In Job Outlook 2022, they rated it highly important, yet only 55.8% rated new graduates very or extremely proficient, one of the two widest gaps that year. In your first years at work, that demand shows up mostly as the quality of the decisions you make. It covers knowing what you are actually allowed to decide, asking a more experienced colleague for a second opinion, using facts rather than a gut feeling where facts exist, and catching yourself looking only for information that confirms what you already think. It also means accepting a good-enough answer when a perfect one would cost the deadline.

5. Getting and applying influence

Initiative ranked fifth in the 2011 list, and NACE also tracks leadership, where the gap between employers’ and students’ ratings exceeds or approaches 30 percent in its comparison of Job Outlook 2025 with the 2024 Student Survey. At entry level, neither means managing people. It means influence without authority: delivering results consistently enough to build a reputation, volunteering to draft the agenda or write the summary, asking for the assignment you want (the worst answer is no), and preparing an idea around what the other person gains from it before you pitch it. Influence is earned in small steps, which makes it one of the most practical places for a newcomer to stand out.

6. Building self-awareness

This last entry is what makes the other five usable. Students rated themselves most highly in teamwork, professionalism and communication, according to NACE: the same skills employers consider most important, and in two of the three, the ones where employers saw the widest shortfalls. Self-assessment on its own is therefore an unreliable guide to which of the most important soft skills you still need to build.

Building self-awareness means getting a more accurate picture of your strengths and blind spots, and feedback is the main tool. Ask specific, forward-looking questions, such as what you should do differently on the next presentation, rather than how you are doing in general. A structured outside view helps as well. Before you decide your self-rating is right, it is worth taking a few minutes to check your ratings against a test that covers the full set of work skills. If it shows a gap, that is a skill to practice, not a verdict on you.

How to choose which soft skill to work on first

Every number above describes groups of graduates, not you, so the ranking can tell you what matters in general but not where your personal gap is. And the gap is not a passing quirk of one survey year: it shows up in the 2022 data and again in the 2025 comparison, because these skills are rarely taught before work begins. That is less a failing on your part than a sign that almost everyone starts work with some of this still to learn.

A practical way to narrow it down:

1. Start with the shared core. Communication and teamwork are demanded in nearly every role, so a gap in either costs you everywhere.
2. Separate evidence from assumption. For each of the six skills, find one concrete moment from your studies, a job or volunteering where you used it. Where you cannot find one, you are likely relying on how it feels.
3. Ask someone who has watched you work. A supervisor, a teammate or a lecturer who has seen you in group work can tell you in one conversation what self-reflection takes months to surface.

Then pick one skill and practice it deliberately for a month before moving on. One skill improved beats six skills worried about.

What makes the list work for you

Step back from the six entries and two threads run through them: how you work with other people, and how accurately you see yourself doing it. Three skills carry most of that weight.

Communication is how your work reaches anyone else. For a career starter, the gains come from small moves (opening an email with what you need, giving the short answer before the background, asking the question rather than guessing), not from presentation flair or a big personality.

Teamwork is how shared results get made. At this stage, it rests less on resolving big conflicts than on small commitments kept, knowledge passed on without being asked, and credit given to the group, which are things a new colleague can do from week one.

Building Self-Awareness is how you find out which of the most important soft skills is actually your gap. It is not about personality types or deep introspection; it is the habit of asking for specific feedback and letting it correct your self-image.

The free Job Skills Test puts numbers on all three, then on the rest of the twelve work skills it covers, so you can see which skill to start with instead of spreading your effort across the whole list. Each of them responds to practice, so whichever comes out lowest is simply your next project.

Where this leaves you

You may already see parts of this in how you work. If you are the one in a group project who asks what “finished” looks like before anyone starts, or who notices when a teammate has gone quiet and checks in, you are practicing communication and teamwork already, just without a name for it. The skills that feel further off are ones you have had little chance to rehearse yet, and you can build them while staying entirely yourself. The distance between how you rate a skill and how a manager rates it tends to matter more as your responsibilities grow, which makes the start of your working life the cheapest moment to find out where it is.

See where your soft skills stand

What remains is to swap the averages for your own picture. The Job Skills Test is a free self-assessment of your work skills: it rates you across all twelve, including the six above, and shows which ones would make the biggest difference to your applications and your first years at work. It takes 7 minutes.