# What Soft Skills Include, From Communication to Time Management Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-include/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-include.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 Soft skills include communication, teamwork, professional behavior, time management, confidence and more. See all twelve, how they group and how to show them. ## Key facts - Title: What Soft Skills Include, From Communication to Time Management - Category: What Are Soft Skills - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: soft skills include - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-include/ ## What this page covers - Soft skills include communication, teamwork, professional behavior, time management, confidence and more. See all twelve, how they group and how to show them. - Practical guidance for soft skills include - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Soft skills include the nontechnical skills that decide how you work with other people and how you manage yourself and your work: communication, teamwork, professional behavior, working with your manager, networking and influence on one side; self-awareness, setting goals, confidence, resilience, time management and decision-making on the other. Every job uses them, whatever the field. If you keep hearing that employers want soft skills but nobody has spelled out what the term covers, the uncertainty makes sense: the category is wide, and much of it is rarely taught out loud. That also means it can be learned once it is named. What helps is knowing what each skill looks like on an ordinary workday, which ones you already have, and how to show them. The answers below take those questions one at a time, and the same three skills keep turning up in them. ## What do soft skills include? We group the soft skills that matter in almost any job into twelve. Each is easier to recognize by what it looks like on an ordinary day than by its name: - Communication: making yourself understood and understanding others, in conversations, emails and meetings. - Teamwork: working toward a shared goal with people whose roles differ from yours, and being someone they can rely on. - Professional behaviors: the everyday conduct colleagues notice first, such as respect, punctuality and discretion. - Working with your manager: building a real working partnership with your boss, from aligned expectations to well-prepared one-on-ones. - Networking: building professional relationships before you need them, mostly by being useful to other people. - Influence: earning the credibility to win support for an idea without any formal authority. - Self-awareness: knowing your strengths and blind spots, and using feedback to see what you cannot see alone. - Setting goals: working out which kind of work fits your strengths and values, rather than following someone else's plan. - Confidence: building belief in what you can do by acting before you feel ready, one manageable step at a time. - Resilience: recovering from setbacks and criticism by putting your energy into what you can control. - Time management: deciding what comes first, saying yes and no deliberately, and keeping work from taking over your evenings. - Decision-making: knowing which calls are yours to make, getting a second opinion on the big ones, and avoiding common thinking traps. None of the twelve depends on technical knowledge of a field, and each one breaks down into something you could do differently tomorrow. ## What are the main types of soft skills? There are two kinds. Interpersonal skills govern how you work with others: the first six on the list above, from communication to influence. Self-management skills govern how you handle yourself and your own work: self-awareness, setting goals, confidence, resilience and time management. Decision-making straddles the line, since some calls are yours alone and others are made with a group. The second kind is easier to overlook because most of it happens out of sight, yet it often decides whether the first kind shows. Speaking up in a meeting takes confidence as much as communication, and keeping a promise to a teammate depends on how well you manage your time. That is why it pays to check both sides of the map, not only the half other people can see. Both respond to practice in the same way. ## Is time management a soft skill? Yes. It is a self-management skill: deciding what deserves your attention first, clarifying what a task really needs and when it is truly due, and saying no, with a reason, when your week is already full. None of that is technical knowledge of a particular field. The line is not absolute. Operating a specific planning tool is a hard skill; deciding which task gets the best hour of your morning is a soft one. The same reasoning places confidence and resilience in the category too, because soft skills are not only people skills. ## What is the difference between hard skills and soft skills? Hard skills are the technical, factual skills that a school or an employer teaches you for a particular kind of work, such as accounting methods or a programming language, and they can usually be tested directly. Soft skills concern how that work gets done: how you work with the people around it and how you manage yourself while you do it. That difference is why soft skills [transfer across industries](/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/transferable-soft-skills/), organizations and roles, while hard skills tend to stay with the job they were learned for. A quick way to sort any skill: if it would be just as useful in a hospital, a bank and a software company, it is almost certainly a soft skill. A technical skill may be what gets your application noticed, but soft skills count at least as much when the hiring decision is made, and for even more with each step of a career after that. ## Is there an official list of soft skills? No. The term covers a broad family of nontechnical skills, and employers, educators and organizations name and group them in different ways, so a short list and a long one can both be reasonable. For graduates, the nearest thing to a shared reference point comes from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the US association that links employers' campus recruiters with college career services. NACE calls these skills [career readiness competencies](/knowledge/employability/career-readiness-competencies/), and its list includes oral and written communication, teamwork and collaboration, and professionalism. So when a career center or a job ad talks about "career readiness" or "competencies," it is largely describing the same family of skills under another name. The more useful question for you is not which list is official, but what the category covers and which parts of it your own work will demand. ## Which soft skills do employers want most? Teamwork and communication come up first. In NACE employer survey results reported in 2023, teamwork and verbal communication ranked among the top soft skills employers seek in job candidates. The reason lies in what entry-level work looks like. Almost every role is done with and through other people, so your ability to cooperate and to make yourself understood shapes how you perform from the first week, long before anyone judges your technical output. That makes those two a sensible default if you are deciding where to put effort. The starting point that pays off fastest, though, is the gap you actually have, and that is hard to judge from the inside. A short self-assessment can [pinpoint your biggest gap](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) so your first effort goes where it counts, and whatever it turns up is a habit you can practice, not a fixed limit. ## Are soft skills personality traits, or can you learn them? You can learn them. A soft skill is a set of behaviors built through deliberate practice, feedback and experience in real situations, not a fixed part of who you are. If speaking up does not come easily to you yet, or you are not the most reliable teammate in your group, that is a skill you have not learned yet. Learning it means changing what you do, not changing your personality. Part of why soft skills feel like traits is that so many of them are [unwritten](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/office-etiquette/). Being on time, how to address a senior colleague, the conventions of a work email, when it is all right to interrupt, what to keep confidential: education rarely teaches any of this explicitly, so most people learn it by trial and error, and it is easy to mistake someone who has already learned it for someone who was born knowing. > What should you wear? What can you say, and what can't you say? Can you tell these kinds of jokes or not? And something as basic as bringing a notepad when you've just started, and taking notes whenever people talk. I had no idea about any of that, and that's what worried me: not knowing how I was supposed to act. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, recalling what worried her before she began. Every question on her list has an answer that can be learned, and not one of them is a question about personality. ## How do I show soft skills on my resume or in an interview? Show them through examples rather than labels. Soft skills are not certified the way a technical qualification is, so naming one, such as "strong communicator," tells an employer very little. What persuades is a [concrete example with three parts](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/soft-skills-interview-questions/): the situation, what you did, and what happened as a result. On a resume, that means a line like "Set up a shared task schedule for a five-person project group and flagged a slipping deadline a week early, so the report went in on time." It shows time management and teamwork without naming either. In an interview, the same three parts turn a vague claim into a story the interviewer can picture. This is where an inventory earns its keep. Go through the twelve and, for each skill you want to claim, note one example from your studies, a student job, volunteering or a team project. A skill you cannot yet back with an example is the next one to practice, not one to claim yet. ## Three soft skills you will use from the first morning Look back across these answers and the same three skills keep surfacing: teamwork and communication at the top of what employers ask for, and professional conduct inside almost every unwritten rule a newcomer worries about. They are also the ones a new job calls on first, long before any technical task lands on your desk. **Communication** is the soft skill almost everyone claims and few could break down. At work it comes apart into habits you can check one at a time: putting your main point in the first line, listening until you understand what was actually asked, choosing a conversation over an email when the topic is sensitive, speaking up in the meeting rather than afterward, and disagreeing without heat. None of it calls for charisma, and each habit is one you can honestly say you have or have not built yet. **Teamwork** asks for more than most group projects did. Getting along is the easy part. The skill is putting the team's goal ahead of your own credit, doing what you said you would, sharing what you know, arguing about the work rather than the person, and then backing a decision you argued against. It also includes the uncomfortable piece: telling a teammate, respectfully and early, when a commitment has slipped. Each of those is a behavior you can watch for in yourself. **Professional Behaviors** cover the part of the category few people think of as a skill at all: the unwritten conduct colleagues register before they judge your work. It means treating everyone with the same respect whatever their role, arriving on time, keeping confidential information confidential, showing appreciation, and steering clear of passive silence, arrogance and constant complaint. It is tempting to call this common sense, but common sense is not common practice, and these habits are learned deliberately, one situation at a time. Before you put any of these on an application, it helps to know which ones you could back up. The **free Job Skills Test** checks your everyday habits in these three and in the rest of the set, **twelve skills in all**, and shows you [where each one stands](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you claim it. A low result is not a verdict; it marks the habit to practice next. ## Where you are starting from Parts of this inventory may already be in how you work, under other names. If you have ever picked up a task in a student job that nobody had assigned because the shift needed it done, that was teamwork. If you have rewritten a message to a professor so the actual question came first, that was communication. The skills that feel thinner are usually the ones you have had fewer chances to use, and each one grows with practice while you stay yourself. Their weight also grows as more of your work runs through other people, so the best moment to find your starting point is before that happens. ## Put your own results next to the list The one step left is finding out which parts of this inventory are already yours. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills that takes 7 minutes. It maps where you stand across all twelve skills, so you can see which ones to lean on in your next application and which ones to build 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 include communication, teamwork, professional behavior, time management, confidence and more. See all twelve, how they group and how to show them. ### 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/soft-skills-include/ Preferred summary: "Soft skills include communication, teamwork, professional behavior, time management, confidence and more. See all twelve, how they group and how to show them." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.