# Types of Soft Skills: The Main Categories and the Skills Inside Each Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/types-of-soft-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/types-of-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 main types of soft skills are interpersonal and self-management skills. See which skills sit in each type, what employers weigh, and how to show yours. ## Key facts - Title: Types of Soft Skills: The Main Categories and the Skills Inside Each - Category: What Are Soft Skills - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Building Self-Awareness - Primary keyword: types of soft skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/types-of-soft-skills/ ## What this page covers - The main types of soft skills are interpersonal and self-management skills. See which skills sit in each type, what employers weigh, and how to show yours. - Practical guidance for types of soft skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The main types of soft skills are interpersonal skills, which govern how you work with other people, and self-management skills, which govern how you handle yourself. Thinking skills such as critical thinking are sometimes counted as a third type. Every skill inside these types is a learnable behavior, not a personality trait. That split does more work than it seems to. Soft skills usually reach you as one loose bundle, in job ads, career advice and feedback forms, which makes it hard to tell what is being asked for or whether you already have it. Sorted by type, each skill becomes something you can picture on an ordinary workday, check yourself against and back up with an example. The types also explain why some skills are easy to spot and others hide in plain sight. ## The main types of soft skills, and what separates them Soft skills are the nontechnical half of work. [Hard skills](/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/what-s-the-difference-between-hard-and-soft-skills/) are the factual and technical knowledge that education and employers teach; soft skills shape how you work with others and how you manage yourself while you put that knowledge to use. The clearest way to sort them is by where each one operates. The National Research Council's 2012 report *Education for Life and Work* groups the competencies people need for work and life into three domains: interpersonal, intrapersonal and cognitive. In plain terms, these are skills you use with other people, skills you use on yourself and skills you use to think. The first two make up the core of soft skills; the third sits on the border. The names vary more than the substance. People skills, employability skills and 21st-century skills cover largely the same ground under different labels, and even the term soft skills is disputed, a point raised at a National Research Council workshop on assessing these skills. Words like "positive attitude" or "integrity" are something else again: they describe character, not skills. A soft skill is something you do, which is why it can be practiced and shown. Whatever the label, the skills underneath sort into the same few types. ### Interpersonal skills: the type that works between people Interpersonal skills are the ones you use in contact with others, whether colleagues, managers, clients or new contacts. The National Research Council places communication, collaboration, responsibility and conflict resolution in this domain. Because these skills play out in front of other people, they are the type others notice first and the type employers ask about most directly: according to NACE's Job Outlook survey, employers hiring new college graduates rank teamwork and verbal communication among the top soft skills they look for. In everyday work, interpersonal skills come in two layers. The basics keep work running: communication, teamwork, working with your manager, which starts with agreeing on what is expected of you, and professional behaviors, such as treating everyone with the same respect, being on time and talking about absent colleagues as if they were in the room. The proactive layer builds on those basics and moves your standing forward: [networking](/knowledge/networking/networking-for-students/), which means investing in relationships before you need them, and influence, which means earning credibility by delivering and then using it to win support for an idea. The order matters. The proactive layer only works once people can rely on you for the basics. ### Self-management skills: the type that works inside you Self-management skills operate before anyone else sees the result: how you read your own strengths, how you steady yourself after a setback, how you decide where your hours go. The National Research Council calls this the intrapersonal domain and divides it into three clusters: openness to new ideas, work ethic and conscientiousness, and a positive view of your own capabilities. The skills of this type include building self-awareness, setting goals, building confidence, building resilience and time management. In practice that means knowing what you are naturally good at and where your blind spots are, letting your career direction grow out of experience and your own work values, acting in small steps while you are still nervous, focusing on what you can control after something goes wrong, and being clear about what is asked of you, and by when, before you say yes. This type rarely appears by name in a job ad, which makes it easy to underrate. That is a mistake. Among the interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies it reviewed, the National Research Council found conscientiousness the most strongly linked to good outcomes in education, careers and health. At work, conscientiousness looks like staying organized, doing what you committed to and putting in steady effort, and each of those is a habit you can build. Self-management is not a quiet sidekick to the interpersonal type; it is what makes the rest of your skills dependable. ### Thinking skills: the type that is sometimes counted The cognitive domain covers reasoning and argument, critical thinking, and creativity and innovation. These are thinking skills. They describe how you reason about a problem rather than how you work with people or manage yourself, so whether they count as soft skills depends on how soft skills are defined. That is why critical thinking and problem-solving are filed under soft skills in some definitions and under cognitive skills in others. We keep the core of soft skills to the interpersonal and self-management types, because that is where the untaught, unwritten part of work lives. Thinking still shows up at work, mostly through decision-making: knowing how much authority you have to decide, getting a second opinion before a big call, and watching for traps such as looking only for information that confirms what you already believe. That is reasoning turned into a workplace habit, and it can be learned like any other. ## How the types of soft skills work together The types are a map, not a set of separate boxes. Participants at a National Research Council workshop on assessing these skills warned that treating the clusters as independent and mutually exclusive is misleading, and an ordinary workday shows why. Telling your manager that a deadline is going to slip takes resilience to stay level-headed, communication to say it early and plainly, and the habit of [bringing a proposed fix](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/examples-of-managing-up/) rather than just the problem, which is part of working with your manager. One short conversation, three skills, two types. That overlap is what makes the types useful for diagnosis. Think about the moments at work or in your studies that tend to go badly. If they mostly happen with other people, such as a group discussion where you never got your point in or an email that landed wrong, the gap is probably interpersonal. If they start before anyone else is involved, such as a task you kept putting off or a piece of criticism you could not shake for days, look at self-management first. Either way, the pattern tells you where to start. ## Turning a type into evidence you can use A type on its own tells an employer very little. "Strong interpersonal skills" is a category, not a claim; [what makes it credible](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/interpersonal-skills-examples-for-cv/) is the behavior underneath and a moment when you used it. Behavior is also the level at which these skills are learned, and most people pick them up on the job rather than in a lecture hall. Asked what a student job had taught her, one of the young people we interviewed about starting work said: > I would feel a week had gone by without working on anything relevant to my degree — but I was learning other things. How to behave at a workplace, how to write a professional email, how to greet someone far more important than yourself, how to book a meeting. Not much academically; it's everything around it I learned. None of that replaces what a degree teaches; it is the layer that sits around it. And every item she names is something you can watch someone do and then practice yourself, which is exactly the level at which to work with the types. So go type by type. Pick two or three behaviors you genuinely recognize in yourself, and for each one find a specific situation from a group project, a job or a placement, plus the result it led to. Interpersonal skills are usually the easiest to back up, because group work and part-time jobs leave a trail of moments with other people. Self-management takes more digging, since it happens out of view: the week you broke a dreaded assignment into steps, or the rejection you picked yourself up from. Because employers name teamwork and verbal communication so often, give those two your strongest examples. Where you come up empty, you have found a gap, not a verdict, and gaps like these close with practice. The free Job Skills Test can [pinpoint your least-developed skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), so you know which behaviors to go after in your next project, job or placement. ## Putting the types to work in an application or a first job Look at what the exercise above actually asked of you: finding the words for what you do, recalling how you behaved in a group, and judging honestly where you stand. Each of those draws on a skill of its own. **Communication** is the soft skill most likely to stay a vague label, and it is also the one you need to describe every other skill. Broken into working parts, it means speaking up when you have something to add, stating your main point first, keeping it brief, listening fully before you answer, and handling the tricky moments, like disagreeing or apologizing, without damaging the relationship. Each part can be practiced on its own in an ordinary week, and each gives you a sharper sentence for an interview than "good communicator" ever will. **Teamwork** is where group projects turn into evidence, once you know what to look for. At work it comes down to specific behaviors: putting the shared goal ahead of personal credit, being reliable enough that people trust your commitments, disagreeing without making it personal, and then committing to a decision the team made even if you argued against it. Most students already have the raw material from project work; the skill is recognizing which of those behaviors you actually showed and which you left to others. **Building Self-Awareness** is what lets you place yourself on the map at all. It means looking honestly at how you work, how that work feels and what results it gets, to find your natural strengths, and asking someone for specific, forward-looking feedback to catch the blind spots you cannot see from the inside. Without it, the types describe other people; with it, they become a starting point that is yours. Of the three, self-awareness is the hardest to practice on instinct, because a general sense that you are "good with people" is easy to hold and hard to check. A structured self-assessment gives that sense something to push against. The **free Job Skills Test** covers communication and teamwork alongside the rest, **twelve work skills spread across these types**, and gives you [a separate score for each](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). Every one of them can be learned, so even a low score is information you can act on rather than a fixed limit. ## Seeing yourself in the types Some of this map probably describes you already, just without a label. If you were the one who sent the summary after a group meeting so everyone knew who was doing what, that was communication and teamwork working together. If you have ever reread a sharp reply and softened it before sending, that was self-management doing its job. The types that feel further away are not a fixed shortfall; they are behaviors you have not had much reason to practice yet, and building them does not mean becoming someone else. They also count for more as your work shifts from tasks you finish alone to results you share with others, which is a good reason to find out now which ones deserve your attention first. ## Find your place on the map You have the map; the step left is marking your own position on it. In 7 minutes, the **free** Job Skills Test, a self-assessment of your work skills, rates you on all twelve skills across these types and shows which few would make the biggest difference to your next application and your first year in a job. ## 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 main types of soft skills are interpersonal and self-management skills. See which skills sit in each type, what employers weigh, and how to show yours. ### 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/types-of-soft-skills/ Preferred summary: "The main types of soft skills are interpersonal and self-management skills. See which skills sit in each type, what employers weigh, and how to show yours." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.