Wondering, “What are soft skills?” Think about your favorite and most admired coworkers, managers, and leaders. Why did you choose these people? Was it because they are great at doing data analysis? Maybe—but it’s more likely you enjoy interacting with this person and appreciate how they do their jobs.
Is that one colleague always so excited to dive into a new project that they motivate others on the team? Do they always speak up at meetings to point out when someone else is being spoken over? All of these behaviors speak to a person’s soft skills, and they’re vital to anybody’s career success.
In fact, soft skills are often just as important as hard skills when it comes to your job search and overall success. Keep reading to learn more about what soft skills are, how to highlight them to land a job, and a list of soft skills examples for your resume and cover letter.
What are soft skills?
Soft skills are the traits and qualities you possess that dictate how you’ll engage with others—also known as interpersonal skills—and how you’ll perform in the workplace. “They’re intangible attributes related to how you work,” says Muse and Fairygodboss career coach Jennifer Smith, founder of Flourish Careers.
You may be more familiar with hard skills, which are often based on specific knowledge like how to do a certain task or use a specific piece of technology, but “soft skills focus more on your actual behaviors or habits in work situations,” says Muse career coach Al Dea.
For example, are you always coming up with outside-the-box solutions and proposals? Can you give a presentation that makes everyone in the room sit up and pay attention? Do you always step in to help when someone on your team needs it? These are demonstrations of your soft skills—creativity, public speaking, and teamwork, respectively.
Soft skills are:
- More subjective than hard skills. Saying that you know how to prepare someone’s taxes or upload content using WordPress is fairly straightforward. Did the taxes get filed correctly? Is the content uploaded? Then you have those skills. But saying that you’re a good leader isn’t as clear-cut.
- More timeless than hard skills. “Many soft skills will continue to be needed for the foreseeable future even as the industry evolves,” Dea says. While technologies will continue to change (and the technical skills you need now might not be as important in 10 years), working hard and being dependable are unlikely to go out of style.
- More transferable than hard skills. If you’re just starting out in your career or if you’re going through a career pivot, you may not be able to use all of the hard skills honed in the past. However, soft skills like communication and creativity are useful in most jobs.
Read this next: Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills: What the Heck Is the Difference?
63 soft skill examples to better understand your strengths
Here are some examples of soft skills divided by category, such as problem-solving and leadership skills. This list isn’t exhaustive, but you can use it to start thinking about which ones you have and which you’d like to develop further.
(Since every employer is going to write job descriptions and identify soft skills a bit differently, some of these skills overlap, but this list can still give you an idea of the soft skills employers want most right now.)
“Every job involves some types of communication,” Dea says. Having the ability to communicate effectively is vital for any role and can affect a number of experiences in the workplace—from how well you convey your expectations and how well you understand others’ expectations. Strong communication skills will mean fewer misunderstandings, clearer indications of progress toward goals, and better relationships with coworkers, among other benefits.
- Active listening
- Negotiation
- Nonverbal communication
- Persuasion
- Presenting
- Public speaking
- Verbal communication
- Written communication
Don’t skip this section just because you aren’t a manager or senior-level employee. “You don’t need to be a leader to demonstrate leadership,” Dea says. Employees at any level can still demonstrate their leadership skills on projects and within their teams.
- Conflict management
- Conflict resolution
- Decision-making
- Strategic thinking
- Delegation
- Empathy
- Flexibility
- Giving feedback
- Management
- Motivating others
- Goal setting
- Cultural competence
- Relationship building
A big part of any job is solving problems, and not every problem has a clear-cut answer, Dea says. The ability to figure out how to approach new or particularly difficult problems is a key soft skill.
- Analytical thinking
- Critical thinking
- Decision-making
- Open-mindedness
- Innovativeness
- Proactivity
- Research
- Resourcefulness
- Troubleshooting
You need to know how to work with others toward a shared goal. This can be as small as making sure a presentation gets done for a team meeting or as big as helping your company hit its goals for the quarter or year. These skills speak to your ability to effectively work as part of a team.
- Collaboration
- Dependability
- Reliability
- Emotional intelligence
- Empathy
- Disability awareness
- Diversity awareness
- Patience
- Self-awareness
- Tact
- Trust and trustworthiness
- Humility
Work ethic and work style skills
These soft skills relate to your particular approach to work. You’ll see that some of these traits and abilities are opposites of each other. That’s because there’s no one correct work style, and some work habits and personal qualities are better suited to different companies and work environments.
- Ability to work well under pressure
- Adaptability
- Flexibility
- Diligence
- Enthusiasm
- Integrity
- Perseverance
- Resilience
- Self-motivation
- Time management
- Ponctuality
- Attention to detail
- Curiosity
- Initiative
- Learning agility
- Independence
- Multitasking
- Organization
- Prioritization
- Proactivity
- Self-management
What are the most in-demand soft skills in 2025?
According to a recent LinkedIn ranking of in-demand skills, these are the soft skills employers are looking for in 2025:
- Adaptability
- Conflict mitigation
- Innovative thinking
- Public speaking
The list also includes skills that combine both soft and hard components, such as:
- Solution-based selling (which blends negotiation and persuasion skills with formal sales training)
- Customer engagement and support (which requires knowledge of company policies, relevant laws and regulations, and strong conflict resolution skills)
- Stakeholder management (which calls for proactivity, communication, and negotiation skills)
How can you highlight your soft skills in a job search?
First, you need to know what soft skills to highlight—and you do that by always carefully reviewing the job description. Companies aren't asking for a self-starter with great attention to detail for no reason.
You can also “take a look at LinkedIn profiles for people who work at the company and see what skills they have,” Smith says. Or you can talk to people who already work in a position or at a company you’re interested in and ask them which soft skills are most vital to success.
Once you know what employers in your industry are looking for, you can tailor your resume, cover letter, and interview answers using the tips that follow.
How to highlight soft skills on your resume
While many job seekers think of their resume as the prime space to show off their hard skills, you should also make sure your soft skills shine. You might include your most important soft skills in a resume summary. Or even list the soft skills mentioned in or directly related to the job description in your skills section, Smith says, though Dea suggests only going this route if you have extra space.
But remember that anyone can say that they have strong leadership skills or problem-solving abilities. You have to show prospective employers how you’ve used your soft skills and what you’ve achieved. This means working your soft skills into your bullet points.
For example, if you wanted to talk about your leadership skills in the work experience section, Smith suggests something like:
- Assumed leadership role for the sales team with the lowest worker satisfaction survey results in the company. Motivated and engaged employees by encouraging feedback, holding a variety of team-building events, and celebrating top performers at weekly meetings, increasing positive sentiment by 34% in one year.
Alternatively, if you need to make your resume more concise, you can combine soft and hard skills into one bullet point. For example:
- Collaborated with a team of 3 to conduct market research through one-on-one meetings with customers about their needs and concerns. Wrote clear and concise questions used by the entire team and assigned tasks and tracked progress in Asana. Presented findings visualized with Tableau and made recommendations to senior staff.
Each of your resume bullets should be quantified and achievement-oriented. When in doubt, ask yourself “Which of my soft skills helped me to accomplish this?” You might also choose action verbs (e.g. collaborated, led, presented, motivated) that speak to the appropriate soft skills, as in the examples above.
Read this next: Every Question You Have About Resume Skills Sections, Answered
How to highlight soft skills in your cover letter
Cover letters are a great place to expand on your soft skills. Tell a story that explicitly mentions your experience with the soft skills in the job description to highlight your fit for the role, Smith says.
For example, if a job description calls for someone with “excellent organizational skills” and you wanted to emphasize yours, you could say:
When I started my current job as office manager for BubbleTech, supplies were stashed wherever there was room. I found Post-its in the kitchen and snacks in a cabinet over the printer! So I put my organizational skills to work, inventorying and rearranging all the supplies. I also sent around a Google Sheet that told everyone where they could find each item.
As with your resume, you should also mention how your actions and use of your skills positively affected the organization in a cover letter. For example:
In addition to checking the inventory weekly, I made sure my colleagues could note on that same Google Sheet when something was running low and I’d know to order more. As a result, BubbleTech stopped wasting money on extra supplies and never again found themselves completely out of any item when it was needed.”
Read this next: Best AI Prompts to Use When Writing a Cover Letter
How to highlight soft skills in a job interview
You can and should mention examples of how you’ve used your soft skills in your answers to interview questions. Think about which of your soft skills you want to emphasize before your interview, and come prepared with stories that show those skills in action.
An effective way to structure your answers is using the STAR method (situation, task, action, result), which will give the interviewer the necessary context, explain why you acted in a certain way, and what results you got.
For example, here's an answer that highlights good communication and conflict resolution skills:
Last year I was the leader of a committee that put together a training on conflict intervention in the workplace. There was one senior staff member in particular who seemed adamant that he would not participate.
It took some careful listening to understand he felt like it wasn’t the best use of his time given his workload. I made sure to acknowledge his concern, then I focused on his direct objection. I explained how one of the main goals of the efficiency was to make everyone’s workload feel lighter.
He did eventually attend. And he was there when I talked to the whole staff about identifying the root issue of a conflict and addressing that directly without bringing in other issues. This is how I aim to handle any disagreement in the workplace.
Highlighting soft skills throughout the hiring process
Your behavior before, during, and after each step of the application process will also show employers some of your soft skills firsthand, Smith says. For example, every virtual or in-person interaction you have with someone at a company says something about your communication skills, Dea says.
Arriving on time for an interview is a given, but speaks to your dependability and time management skills. Being prepared with strong, inquisitive questions about the role shows how curious and proactive you are. Asking the interviewer questions about themselves and responding earnestly to their answers shows empathy and active listening skills.
How can you improve your soft skills?
Because they’re not based on specific knowledge like hard skills, soft skills are often considered more difficult to learn or strengthen. There’s a bit of truth to that, but that doesn’t mean you can’t develop your soft skills.
- Establish where your soft skills stand now. Our experts suggest looking at past feedback from performance reviews and identifying which soft skills have helped you succeed in your job and which ones could have helped. You may also take skills assessment tests or quizzes (like these EQ quizzes, this detail-oriented quiz, and this time management quiz).
- Identify one or two areas you want to focus on first. Think about any areas where you’re often running into problems at work or repeatedly getting feedback on. These are probably the soft skills you want to start with. For example, do you always find yourself needing to re-explain what you wrote in an email? Maybe look into improving your writing skills.
- Practice. Smith recommends putting yourself in situations where you’ll have to stretch your soft skills, but start small. For example, do you struggle with public speaking? Maybe you can give a short presentation to your immediate team at an upcoming meeting. Are your leadership skills lacking? Volunteer to run points on a simple project.
- Consider taking a class. While online classes for soft skills are less common than classes on how to use a flashy new program, you can still find courses online that will help you with your interpersonal and other skills. You can also use AI tools—like chatbots or role-playing simulations—to practice communication, interview scenarios, or even conflict resolution in a low-pressure setting.
- Ask your network for help. “Find a mentor who is good at what you’re trying to improve and ask them to coach you,” Smith says. Or if you have a coworker who’s great at the soft skill you’re trying to work on, you might observe and evaluate what they do and think about how you can apply these strategies yourself, Dea says.
The bottom line: You need to expose yourself to situations that will challenge and force you to improve or develop some traits that might be necessary in a work environment. You probably already have a handful of good soft skills, you just have to start highlighting and using them more often.
For extra guidance, read this next: How to Improve Your Soft Skills—Anyone Can Do It!
FAQs
Why are soft skills important?
Soft skills are crucial to your success and reputation, no matter what your role or seniority level. “The way you get work done and interact with others is a critical component within the workplace,” Smith says.
Soft skills vs hard skills: What's the difference?
Soft skills are intangible traits, while hard skills are measurable knowledge or ability necessary to perform a task. For example, creative thinking is a soft skill, while coding is a hard skill.
What are the best soft skills for resumes?
There are no best or worst soft skills to put on a resume, but there are relevant soft skills. To know what is and isn't relevant, you must scan through the job posting and observe what skills the employer is highlighting as critical for the position. Then, adapt your resume accordingly.
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Amanda Cardoso contributed to the latest version of this article.