# Soft Skills: What They Are, the Main Types, and How to Build Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/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 Soft skills are the nontechnical skills for working with others and managing yourself. Learn the main types, why employers value them, and how to build yours. ## Key facts - Title: Soft Skills: What They Are, the Main Types, and How to Build Them - Category: What Are Soft Skills - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Professional Behaviors, Teamwork - Primary keyword: soft skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills/ ## What this page covers - Soft skills are the nontechnical skills for working with others and managing yourself. Learn the main types, why employers value them, and how to build yours. - Practical guidance for soft skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Soft skills are the nontechnical skills you use to work with other people and to manage yourself on the job: communicating clearly, collaborating in a team, behaving professionally, keeping your footing after a setback. Schools and employers teach hard skills, but soft skills are mostly unwritten rules. They are behaviors you learn, not personality traits. That is a big part of why the phrase can feel slippery. It turns up in job ads, interview questions and performance reviews, usually without anyone spelling out what it covers or how you would know whether you have enough of it. It gets much clearer once you see that soft skills sort into a few distinct groups, and why they end up counting for as much as anything on your transcript. ## What soft skills are, and how they differ from hard skills Hard skills are the factual and technical competencies you can be taught and tested on: accounting rules, a programming language, lab procedures, the content of your degree. Soft skills cover the other half of doing a job well. That means how you behave, communicate and collaborate, and how you regulate your own effort and reactions while you do it. The term began as a training category. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, "soft skills" first appeared in U.S. Army training courses in the early 1970s, as a name for the nontechnical side of job performance. That origin is worth remembering, because from the start the idea was about what people do on the job, which is exactly the kind of thing that can be trained. The biggest practical difference is how each kind gets learned. Hard skills come with a curriculum, and soft skills mostly don't. They live in unspoken rules: when it is fine to interrupt a colleague, how to [phrase a disagreement](/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-disagree-respectfully/), what a useful status update looks like. Most people pick them up through trial and error, and some never do. That is how someone can be well qualified on paper and still feel unprepared for the everyday mechanics of a workplace. Nobody handed them the rules, because the rules are rarely written down. There is also no single agreed definition or list of soft skills. So a working definition built on concrete behavior is far more useful than a long list of admirable qualities. "Good communicator" gives you nothing to practice. "Puts the main point in the first line of an email" does. ## The main types of soft skills At the broadest level, soft skills come in two kinds. Interpersonal skills govern how you deal with other people: colleagues, managers, clients. Intrapersonal skills, also called self-management skills, govern how you deal with yourself. The University of Bern's career service draws the same line, listing conflict resolution and persuasiveness as interpersonal and self-confidence and time management as intrapersonal. The split matters because it shows soft skills are not only about being sociable. Half of them are about how you handle your own confidence, effort and reactions. A second way to sort them follows where they take you. You start with managing yourself, move on to working with others every day, and then build your standing over time. Seen that way, soft skills fall into three groups. ### Self-management skills These are the intrapersonal skills. Building self-awareness means knowing your strengths and blind spots and putting feedback to use. Setting goals means choosing a direction that fits who you are. Confidence is built by doing, and resilience keeps a setback from knocking you off course for a week. These skills work inward and are mostly invisible to others, yet they decide how consistently you apply everything else. Someone who knows how to recover from a sharp comment will keep speaking up in meetings. Someone who doesn't will go quiet. ### Everyday work skills You need these from your first day in any job, and most of them are interpersonal: professional behavior, communication, teamwork and working with your manager. Time management and decision-making belong here too, because they shape how you get work done alongside others. This is the group people most often judge by the unwritten rules. Do you show up on time? Do you answer messages promptly, disagree without making it personal and deliver what you said you would? Colleagues notice these things long before they form a view of your technical work. ### Proactive skills Networking and influence build on the everyday skills and matter more as a career goes on. Networking means building relationships before you need them, by being useful to people rather than keeping score. Influence means [moving ideas forward without formal authority](/knowledge/influence/influence-without-authority/), through a reputation for delivering, taking the initiative and persuading people honestly. Nobody expects a new graduate to master either one in the first month, but both depend on having the basics in place. ## Why soft skills matter so much at work Soft skills transfer in a way few hard skills do. They apply in any industry, organization or role, and they don't go out of date when a tool or method changes. For someone starting out, that makes them the one skill set you are sure to take into every job you ever have. They also carry real weight in hiring. Hard skills often land people their first job, but soft skills count at least as much in the decision. They count for more as a career goes on, because more responsibility increasingly means getting work done through other people. [Recruiters actively screen for them](/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/most-important-soft-skills/). In an iCIMS survey of 400 HR and recruiting professionals, time management was among the three soft skills they valued most, named by 48 percent. The logic is simple. An employer who hires you is betting on what you know, and also on how you will organize your work, cooperate with a team and handle the moments that don't go to plan. ## Can you learn soft skills? Yes, and this matters more than anything else in this article. Soft skills are learnable behaviors, not personality traits. Improving them means changing what you do in specific situations: how you open an email, how you push back in a meeting, what you do in the hour after a mistake. You don't have to become a different person. [An introvert can learn to network](/knowledge/networking/how-to-network-as-an-introvert/) well, and someone who is naturally blunt can learn to disagree in a way that keeps trust intact. Because these skills are learned on the job rather than taught, gaps don't close by themselves over time. Plenty of people work for decades with a gap no one ever pointed out to them. That is not because they couldn't learn the skill. It is because nobody showed them where to look. > Some of the partners, even though they're so experienced, aren't very good at certain things on the soft-skills side — and that's even harder to handle. How do you tell someone with thirty years more experience than you that you think they're doing it completely wrong? That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work. She was describing a dilemma that says less about the partners than about how these skills get learned. Years of experience build expertise, but they don't hand anyone the unwritten rules. Those still have to be learned on purpose, at any stage of a career. According to Training Industry, soft skills can be built through classroom instruction, coaching, role-play, simulations and on-the-job learning. All of these take sustained practice rather than a single course. The most reliable approach is narrow and repeated. Pick one skill and one situation where it keeps coming up, try one specific behavior, and ask someone you trust how it landed. Seen this way, a gap is just something you haven't learned yet. The hard part is usually knowing where to begin, so it helps to [find the gaps nobody has named](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you choose what to practice. ## The soft skills colleagues notice first Look back across the three groups and one pattern stands out. The skills other people notice first are the ones you use with them every day. **Communication** is where most people's picture of soft skills starts, and with good reason: you use it from your first email to your first meeting. It has less to do with being articulate than with a few habits you can repeat. Put your main point first, listen fully before you answer, and choose a conversation over a message when the topic is sensitive. Seen that way, it stops being a talent you either have or lack. **Professional Behaviors** are the unwritten norms colleagues judge you on before they judge your work. They include respecting everyone regardless of rank, being on time and showing appreciation for others' contributions. They also include avoiding passive, arrogant or relentlessly negative behavior. Naming these behaviors turns a vague instruction like "be more professional" into something you can actually check, without asking you to become someone you're not. **Teamwork** is often where the gap between school and work shows most. Grades rewarded your own output, while workplaces reward a shared purpose. Day to day, that means doing what you commit to and sharing credit. Less obviously, it also means disagreeing openly when it matters and then backing the decision the team makes. The goal is trust, not getting along with everyone. Professional behaviors are the hardest of the three to judge from the inside, because people rarely tell you when you have broken an unwritten rule. An outside view helps here. The **free Job Skills Test** lets you [compare where these three stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), **alongside the wider set of work skills it measures**. Every one of them can be practiced, so a lower score simply tells you where to start. ## Building on what you already do Some of this probably describes how you already work. Maybe you are the one who sends the recap after a group meeting, or the friend people call to rehearse a hard conversation. If you have noticed that the same request gets a different answer in person than in a message, you are already working with the raw material of communication. The skills you haven't built yet are the same kind of thing, just not practiced yet. You get to decide which ones matter most for the work you want. Each step up in responsibility gives them more weight, which is a good reason to start from a clear picture rather than a guess. ## Find out where your soft skills stand All that remains is to see your own starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. In 7 minutes it shows where you stand across all twelve skills and which ones would make the biggest difference for you right now. ## 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 for working with others and managing yourself. Learn the main types, why employers value them, and how to build yours. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Professional Behaviors, Teamwork. ### 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/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.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/ Preferred summary: "Soft skills are the nontechnical skills for working with others and managing yourself. Learn the main types, why employers value them, and how to build yours." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.