# The Top 10 Soft Skills: What Each Looks Like at Work and Where to Start Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/top-10-soft-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/top-10-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 top 10 soft skills for work, grouped into three kinds: what each looks like day to day, how to prove them in interviews, and which to build first. ## Key facts - Title: The Top 10 Soft Skills: What Each Looks Like at Work and Where to Start - Category: What Are Soft Skills - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: top 10 soft skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/top-10-soft-skills/ ## What this page covers - The top 10 soft skills for work, grouped into three kinds: what each looks like day to day, how to prove them in interviews, and which to build first. - Practical guidance for top 10 soft skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The top 10 soft skills for work are communication, teamwork, professional behaviors, working with your manager, influence, time management, self-awareness, confidence, resilience and decision-making. None of them is a personality trait. Each is a set of everyday behaviors, which means each one can be practiced, shown with a real example and improved. If you are about to start your first job, or are a year or two into one, you have probably heard that these skills decide who gets hired and who gets the interesting work, without anyone ever teaching them to you. A list of ten feels far more manageable once you see that it holds three different kinds of skill, each one built in a different place. ## What puts a soft skill in the top 10 Any ranking of soft skills is a snapshot of what was measured, by whom and when. LinkedIn's 2019 analysis of the skills companies needed most, as reported by the World Economic Forum, put creativity first on its soft-skills list, followed by persuasion, collaboration, adaptability and time management. Measure demand on a different platform or in a different year and the order moves. The useful part of a list like that is the kind of skill on it: working with other people, bringing them around to an idea, and managing your own time and your response to change. Three of LinkedIn's five map straight onto the ten above. Persuasion is the working core of influence, collaboration is teamwork, and time management keeps its name. Adapting to change lives in two places on the list: in resilience, which is about recovering when plans fall apart, and in the openness to change that belongs to professional behaviors. Creativity is a thinking skill, and thinking skills get their own section below. The ten on this page were chosen for a different reason. They show up in almost any job from the first week, they carry over from one employer and industry to the next, and each one can be learned. Unlike a technical skill tied to one tool or field, time spent on communication or on managing your own workload pays off whichever direction your career takes. That matters a great deal if you do not yet know where you are headed. ## The three kinds of soft skills behind the top 10 The ten are easier to work with once you sort them. The National Research Council's framework, which a University of Nebraska at Omaha study used to group soft skills, separates three kinds: interpersonal skills, used in your dealings with other people; intrapersonal skills, which operate inside you and cover how you manage yourself; and cognitive skills, which concern how you think a problem through. The ETS Skills Taxonomy, published in 2025, likewise keeps interpersonal and intrapersonal skills as categories of their own, separate from cognitive and digital ones. The split is practical rather than academic. Each kind is practiced in a different place, so knowing which kind a skill belongs to tells you where to work on it. ### Interpersonal skills: how you deal with other people These five happen between you and someone else, in conversations, meetings and shared work. Their distinguishing feature is that they are judged in real time by the person on the other side, and there is rarely a second draft. 1. **Communication**: Communication is less one talent than a handful of habits you can check one at a time. State your main point first. Give people your full attention while they talk, instead of preparing your reply. Speak up in meetings, even briefly. Keep emails short enough to read on a phone, with the request in the opening lines. When you disagree, say so plainly and keep it about the issue. Pick the habit you trust least and practice that one. 2. **Teamwork**: Trust on a team grows out of small, visible acts. Do what you said you would by the time you said you would. Share what you know instead of keeping it as your edge. When you disagree, argue about the plan rather than the person, and once the team has decided, back the decision. Pull your weight on the unglamorous parts of the work too; doing whatever the team needs is part of the role. 3. **Professional behaviors**: This is the unwritten code colleagues use to decide whether you are easy to work with. It covers being on time, showing a receptionist the same respect as a director, speaking about people as if they were in the room, and getting the dull administrative tasks done without a fuss. It also comes with a short list of things to avoid: going silent in meetings, acting superior and complaining by default. 4. **Working with your manager**: Your manager sees more of your work than anyone and assesses it, so treat the relationship as a partnership with a shared goal. Ask early what a good result looks like and which decisions are yours to make. Bring an agenda to your one-on-ones, and when something goes wrong, raise it quickly, ideally with a proposed fix. 5. **Influence**: Influence starts long before you try to persuade anyone. It rests on a reputation for delivering, and it grows when you take the initiative, such as volunteering to draft the plan or asking for the assignment you want. Persuasion itself is mostly preparation: understanding what the other side cares about before you make your case, presenting the drawbacks along with the benefits, and following up after the meeting. Delivering your own work well does not cover this group, and under deadline pressure it is easy to let it slide. > 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. Those are the words of one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, thinking back on a student job. He ends on what he wants to learn from it, and that is the useful part: the relationships around your work respond to deliberate effort, just as the tasks do. ### Intrapersonal skills: how you manage yourself The next four concern how you run yourself: your time, your view of your own strengths, your nerve and your recovery. What sets them apart is that they happen inside you. Other people see them only indirectly, as reliability and steadiness. 6. **Time management**: Before you accept a task, pin down who wants it, what exactly they need, when it is due (a date, not "as soon as possible") and what finished looks like. Put the important ahead of the merely urgent, and start with the task you are least sure how to do. Once people trust your work, say no clearly when you need to, and give a reason. A sudden change of priorities is also far easier to absorb when your list was clear to begin with. 7. **Self-awareness**: Know what you are genuinely good at, not just competent at, and notice what happens in you when you are corrected. Ask for feedback that is specific and points forward, such as what would make your next presentation more useful, and take a moment to reflect before you defend yourself. 8. **Confidence**: Confidence at work comes from evidence, and evidence comes from doing. Break an intimidating task into steps small enough to start today, accept that the nerves come along, and count each finished step as proof. When something goes wrong, analyze what went wrong rather than who is to blame, and move on to the next play. 9. **Resilience**: Setbacks are certain, so the skill lies in the recovery. Sort what you can control from what you cannot, and spend your energy on the first. When a single piece of criticism turns into "I'm bad at this job," test that thought the way you would test a friend's, and talk it through with someone you trust. This is also where adapting to change lives: getting back on your feet when a project is canceled or a plan changes overnight. ### Cognitive skills: how you think a problem through The third kind concerns how you reason about a problem rather than how you relate to people or manage yourself. In the University of Nebraska at Omaha study, this group held critical thinking, creativity and decision-making. These skills are built differently from the other two kinds: by working on real problems and checking your reasoning afterward, not by practicing conversations. Of the three, decision-making is the one a new employee exercises visibly from the first week: what to handle alone, what to take to a manager, and when to stop gathering information and act. That makes it the tenth skill on the list. 10. **Decision-making**: Good decisions at work start with [knowing your authority](/knowledge/decision-making/decision-making-authority/): which calls you can make alone, which need a sign-off and which belong to someone else. Within that space, use facts rather than hunches where you can, and accept that some uncertainty never goes away. When you decide with others, ask the quiet people for their view before the loudest opinion sets the direction. And if you notice you have stopped looking for evidence against your preferred option, that is the moment to slow down. ## How to show these soft skills on a résumé and in interviews Writing "excellent communicator" [on a résumé](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/soft-skills-resume-examples/) tells an employer very little, because anyone can write it. What makes the claim credible is a short account of a moment when you used the skill: the situation, what you did and what changed as a result. That is the logic behind [behavioral interview questions](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/soft-skills-interview-questions/) such as "Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate." The question is not whether you have the skill. It is a request for proof. You do not need a full-time job to have that proof. Group projects, part-time jobs, volunteering and student organizations all count, as long as the example is specific. Compare "good at teamwork" with "When two people left our group project three weeks before the deadline, I redrew the plan, took over the data analysis, and we submitted on time." The second version shows reliability, coordination and a result in a single sentence, and it gives the interviewer something to ask about. A simple habit makes this easier: keep a running note with one entry per skill, recording the date, the situation, what you did and what happened. Built up over a semester or a few months at work, it gives you a prepared story for every skill on this list. ## Which of the top 10 soft skills to work on first Because these are behaviors rather than traits, they improve the way any skill does: you [practice in real situations](/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/train-soft-skills/), get feedback and adjust. The belief that some people simply "have" people skills stops many students and new employees from working on the gaps they actually have. A gap is a skill you have not practiced yet, nothing more. Trying to improve all ten at once is a reliable way to improve none of them. A better order is to start with communication, teamwork and professional behaviors, because colleagues notice them from your first week, whatever the job. Then add the one skill on the list that feels furthest from where you are now. Finding that one takes some honesty. Go down the list and, for each skill, try to recall a specific moment from the last few months when you used it well. The skills where nothing comes to mind are your candidates. Memory is not the most reliable judge of your own habits, though, and the free Job Skills Test gives you [a clear starting point](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) without the guesswork. ## What colleagues notice in your first weeks Run back over the ten and ask which ones a new colleague could observe on your first Monday. Three are visible long before your results are. **Communication** is the one that most needs translating from a résumé word into something you do. In practice it comes down to a few everyday habits: leading with your point, listening without rehearsing your answer, saying something in the meeting rather than afterward in the hallway, and writing emails a busy person can act on. None of that requires being a polished public speaker. It requires noticing which habit you tend to skip. **Teamwork** is where reliability becomes visible. It shows in the commitment met on the day you promised, in the knowledge you pass on without being asked, and in a disagreement kept to the plan rather than the person. If you have been through a group project or a busy shift, you already have material here. The skill does not mean going along with everything to keep the peace; holding each other to commitments, respectfully and without delay, is part of it. **Professional Behaviors** cover the norms behind phrases like "good attitude" and "work ethic": showing up on time and prepared, taking a genuine interest in colleagues' work, thanking people for their help, and taking complaints to the right person at the right moment. These are habits, not a personality, and they leave plenty of room to be yourself. They are learned by watching and asking, which you can start doing in any workplace, a part-time job included. If you want to know which of these three is strongest for you, the free **Job Skills Test** lets you [compare these three side by side](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). It measures them as part of a wider set of **twelve work skills**, and because each one responds to practice, a lower result on any of them is simply information about where to put your effort. ## The parts of this you already do Some of this list may already describe you on an ordinary day. If you are the one who sends the summary after a group meeting so everyone knows who agreed to what, that is communication and teamwork in a single email. If you have stayed late to fix a mistake and then told the person it affected, you were practicing professional behavior and resilience at the same time. The skills that feel further away are simply the ones you have had less reason to practice so far, and building them asks for new habits, not a new personality. The stakes on them rise quietly. A missed handover costs little in a group project and a great deal on a client account, so the earlier you know your starting point, the more room you have to build. The next step is small and concrete: an honest read on where you stand today. ## Find out where your soft skills stand Taking that step costs you nothing. 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, including the ten on this page, and points to the ones that will make the biggest difference to your applications, your interviews 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 top 10 soft skills for work, grouped into three kinds: what each looks like day to day, how to prove them in interviews, and which to build first. ### 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/top-10-soft-skills/ Preferred summary: "The top 10 soft skills for work, grouped into three kinds: what each looks like day to day, how to prove them in interviews, and which to build first." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.