# Soft Skills List: The 12 Skills That Matter at Work, Sorted by What They Do Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-list/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-list.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 A soft skills list in two halves: six interpersonal and six self-management skills, what each looks like in practice, and how to show them to employers. ## Key facts - Title: Soft Skills List: The 12 Skills That Matter at Work, Sorted by What They Do - Category: What Are Soft Skills - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Building Self-Awareness - Primary keyword: soft skills list - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-list/ ## What this page covers - A soft skills list in two halves: six interpersonal and six self-management skills, what each looks like in practice, and how to show them to employers. - Practical guidance for soft skills list - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation A practical soft skills list has two halves. Interpersonal skills shape how you work with other people: communication, teamwork, working with your manager, professional behaviors, networking and influence. Self-management skills shape how you handle yourself: self-awareness, setting goals, confidence, resilience, time management and decision-making. All twelve are learnable behaviors, not personality traits. That matters when a job ad asks for "excellent communication" and "a team player" and you are left wondering what either phrase means in practice, or which ones you could honestly claim. Names are easy to collect. Knowing what each skill looks like on an ordinary workday, and where you stand on it, is what makes a list useful, and that starts with why the list splits the way it does. ## A soft skills list in two halves There is no official soft skills list. Researchers have not agreed on how many soft skills there are or exactly how to define them, so the useful question is not how long a list is but whether each item names a concrete behavior you can practice and show. The National Academies, in its 2012 report *Education for Life and Work*, sorts the skills people need into three broad domains: interpersonal, intrapersonal and cognitive. The first two are what soft skills actually cover. The third is often mixed in, and it is worth knowing why it belongs elsewhere. Every skill below is transferable. It applies in any industry and any role, and it does not go out of date the way a software tool or [a technical method](/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/hard-soft-skills-definition/) can, which is why time spent on it early keeps paying off across a whole career. ### Interpersonal skills: the six you use with other people These are the skills you exercise in interaction with colleagues, managers and contacts. They are also the ones employers ask about most: in NACE's Job Outlook surveys of employers hiring new college graduates, communication skills and the ability to work in a team consistently rank among the most sought-after attributes, alongside initiative. The exact order shifts from year to year; the core does not. - Communication: stating your main point first, listening fully before you respond, writing emails people can act on, and speaking up in meetings. - Teamwork: putting the team's goal ahead of your own credit, doing what you commit to, and disagreeing openly before backing the decision the team makes. - Working with Your Manager: treating the relationship as a partnership, aligning expectations about goals and decision authority, and bringing a proposed solution along with each problem. - Professional Behaviors: showing respect to everyone regardless of role, being on time, handling confidential information carefully, and steering clear of gossip, arrogance and constant complaining. - Networking: building relationships before you need them, offering help without keeping score, and following up after a first meeting. - Getting and Applying Influence: earning a reputation by delivering, taking the initiative to ask and volunteer, and preparing your case around what the other person cares about. Initiative, the third attribute employers keep naming, sits inside influence here. It is the habit of asking for the task, volunteering to draft the agenda, and taking an opening when one appears. ### Self-management skills: the six you use on yourself These skills work inward, on your own thoughts, priorities and reactions. The National Academies report makes a point that is easy to miss: interpersonal skill depends on self-regulation. Staying calm and constructive in a disagreement starts with managing your own reaction to it, which is why the two halves of the list cannot really be separated. - Building Self-Awareness: knowing your natural strengths, recognizing your own biases, and asking for specific feedback to find your blind spots. - Setting Goals: exploring different kinds of work and letting your direction emerge from experience, guided by your strengths and work values rather than other people's plans for you. - Building Confidence: building belief in your ability by doing, breaking a daunting task into steps and acting while you are still nervous. - Building Resilience: recovering from setbacks by focusing on what you can control and questioning the automatic thoughts that make one mistake feel like a disaster. - Time Management: clarifying exactly what is asked and by when, putting important work ahead of merely urgent work, saying no when you need to, and protecting your time off. - Decision-Making: knowing how much decision authority you have, getting a second opinion, and watching for traps such as only seeking information that confirms what you already think. ### Thinking skills: why they belong on a separate list [Critical thinking](/knowledge/decision-making/critical-thinking/) and analytical reasoning matter at work, and they are often filed under soft skills. The National Academies treats cognitive skills as their own domain, distinct from the interpersonal and self-management skills above. Folding them in makes a soft skills list longer without making it more useful. Keep them on a separate list: they describe how you reason about a problem, while soft skills describe how you work with others and manage yourself while you solve it. ## Skills versus traits: what belongs on the list Words like "work ethic", "integrity" or "positive attitude" are often treated as soft skills, but they are a different kind of thing. They are labels for character. They describe what an employer hopes to see, not how anyone gets there. A skill is a behavior: listening before you answer, confirming a deadline in writing, asking a colleague to review a draft. Behaviors can be practiced, improved and backed with an example. A trait label on a résumé is a claim no one can check. The practical rule is to keep your own soft skills list to behaviors and let the traits show through them. Reliably doing what you said you would do, week after week, is how "work ethic" becomes visible to anyone around you. ## Why so many soft skills go unlearned Much of what is on a soft skills list works as [unspoken rules](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/office-etiquette/): how to phrase a request to someone senior, when to interrupt a busy colleague, what tone a formal email should take. Education rarely teaches them and employers tend to assume them, so most people pick them up by trial and error, and some never quite do. If any of this rings true for you, it is far from unusual. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described her first internship this way: > For quite a while, I felt like I was mostly taking minutes or doing things like preparing invitations for seminars. But even those tasks could be difficult, because I had never actually been taught how to do them. > > There were all sorts of situations where I found it embarrassing that I had to keep asking for help, because I felt like these were things I should already know. > > But I hadn't been taught how to write a formal email, or how to invite a well-known professor or a government official to a meeting with a VIP person. How do you phrase something like that in the right way? What tone do you use? What is considered appropriate? > > Those things may seem simple once you know how to do them, but when you are new, they really aren't. Her point is the one worth holding on to. A gap on this list usually means you were never shown, not that you lack the ability, and that makes it closable. Read the list as a learning plan rather than a verdict. ## How to turn a soft skills list into evidence An employer reading "[strong communicator](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/how-to-list-soft-skills-on-resume/)" learns almost nothing. What carries weight is the situation behind it: the stalled group project you got moving again, the deadline you renegotiated before it slipped, the feedback you asked for and then acted on. For each soft skill you want to claim, find one specific moment where you used the behavior and one result it produced. Give communication and teamwork the most preparation, since they are the skills an interviewer is most likely to probe. If you are not sure which items you could back with a real example today, [mapping your current skill levels](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) first gives you a shortlist to build those examples around, so you prepare stories for your real strengths instead of guessing. ## What makes the list work for you Look back over the twelve and a pattern shows. Whether a list like this helps you depends less on the list itself than on three things: putting these skills into words, using them alongside other people, and seeing yourself clearly against them. **Communication** is the skill nearly every employer asks about, and also the one most easily reduced to an empty adjective. In practice it is a handful of concrete habits: leading with your main point, listening fully before you reply, choosing a conversation over an email when the topic is sensitive, and keeping messages short enough to act on. Each of those can be practiced in an ordinary week and described in a single sentence at an interview. **Teamwork** gives "team player" real substance. In education most work is graded individually; at work, outcomes are shared. The skill is putting the team's purpose ahead of your own credit, building trust by doing what you say you will, and raising disagreement openly before committing fully to what the team decides. It is not about keeping the peace: necessary disagreement, handled without making it personal, is part of it. **Building Self-Awareness** is what lets you place yourself on the list at all. It means noticing which kinds of work come naturally to you, how they feel and what results they produce, and asking a manager or colleague for specific feedback on what to do differently next time. That turns a generic checklist into a personal one: these items are strengths, and these are gaps you simply have not learned yet. That last step is where the free **Job Skills Test** helps. It does the placing for you **across the full list, not only these three**, and shows [which gaps are worth closing first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). Because every skill on it can be learned, whatever the results show is a plan rather than a judgment. ## Where this list meets your own work Some entries on this list probably describe things you already do, just under no particular name. If you can recall the group project where you got two stalled teammates talking again, or the busy week you got through by deciding what to drop, you already hold the raw material for teamwork and time management. The entries that feel distant are not a fixed shortfall. They are behaviors you have not had the chance to practice yet, and you can build them without becoming a different person. As more of your work depends on other people, and more people depend on you, these skills decide more of how it goes, which is exactly why it pays to know now which ones to work on. ## Put your name next to the soft skills list What remains is to see where you stand on it. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: it rates you across all twelve skills on this list and shows which ones would make the biggest difference to your applications and your first years at work. It takes 7 minutes. ## 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? A soft skills list in two halves: six interpersonal and six self-management skills, what each looks like in practice, and how to show them to employers. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Teamwork, Building Self-Awareness. ### 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/self-awareness.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-list/ Preferred summary: "A soft skills list in two halves: six interpersonal and six self-management skills, what each looks like in practice, and how to show them to employers." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.