What are Workforce Skills?

Workforce skills are the capabilities people need to perform the work an organization requires, and understanding them helps employers hire, develop, and deploy people more effectively. They include job-specific expertise as well as the communication, judgment, and adaptability people use to apply that expertise. The right mix depends on the role and can change as tools, processes, and customer needs change. For individuals, recognizing and demonstrating relevant skills can support employability and career mobility. For organizations, a clear view of skills helps identify gaps and decide whether to address them through hiring, training, or changes to how work is done.

The Main Types of Workforce Skills

Workforce skills are often grouped into technical skills, human skills, and transferable or adaptive skills. These categories overlap, and a role rarely depends on just one of them. The distinctions are useful because they help employers describe what work requires and help individuals see which abilities they can develop or apply in a new setting.

Technical Skills

Technical skills, sometimes called hard skills, are practical abilities used to complete particular tasks. People develop them through education, training, certification, work experience, or hands-on practice. Their relevance depends on the work: operating specialized equipment may be essential in one role, while using data-analysis software may matter more in another.

Examples include using accounting, design, scheduling, or data-analysis software; operating machinery or specialized equipment; writing code or managing cybersecurity controls; performing clinical, laboratory, or skilled-trade procedures; applying industry methods or standards; and creating financial reports, forecasts, or project plans.

Technical expertise is rarely sufficient on its own. A data analyst, for example, needs to understand data tools and methods, but also needs to explain findings to people who may not have a technical background. The skill is valuable when it can be applied and communicated in ways that help others act on the work.

Human Skills

Human skills are the behaviors that help people communicate, collaborate, make decisions, and contribute reliably. They are sometimes called soft skills, although the term human skills emphasizes their practical importance to work. The U.S. Department of Labor identifies professionalism, oral and written communication, teamwork, collaboration, and critical thinking and problem-solving as important workplace skills. Its guidance notes that employers can view these skills as even more important to work readiness than basic reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Human skills include listening carefully, communicating clearly, giving and receiving useful feedback, working through disagreements constructively, managing time, meeting commitments, showing accountability, and using sound judgment when information is incomplete. They matter in settings ranging from customer service and healthcare to logistics, engineering, and leadership because they help people turn technical knowledge into useful results.

Transferable and Adaptive Skills

Transferable skills can be used across jobs, industries, or work environments. Examples include organization, decision-making, learning agility, project coordination, research, and digital literacy. These capabilities can help someone move between roles because they are not tied to one particular tool or job title.

Adaptive skills help people respond when work changes. Employees may need to learn a new system, follow a revised process, serve a different customer group, or collaborate across functions. Curiosity, resilience, comfort with change, and the ability to apply knowledge in a new situation help people adjust without losing sight of the work's goals.

Why Workforce Skills Matter

For individuals, workforce skills support employability, confidence, advancement, and career mobility. Someone who can learn new tools, work effectively with colleagues, and solve unfamiliar problems may be better prepared when a role changes or a new opportunity arises.

For employers, skills affect how well teams deliver work, serve customers, manage risk, and respond to change. A skills gap occurs when the capabilities available do not match the work an organization needs done. It can reflect missing expertise, limited training, or a mismatch between existing roles and new requirements, rather than a simple shortage of workers.

Employer findings reported by SHRM illustrate how requirements can shift: nearly 70% of organizations reported difficulty filling full-time positions. The report also found that 28% said filling full-time jobs required new skills, while 47% said existing roles had been updated with new skill requirements. SHRM connects AI-driven workforce transformation with an accelerating need for reskilling. These findings underscore why organizations need to review both who they hire and how they help current employees build capabilities.

How AI Changes Workforce Skill Needs

AI and other digital tools are changing tasks across many fields. Some work can be automated or completed faster, while people remain responsible for evaluating outputs, protecting quality, making decisions, and communicating results to customers or colleagues. The effect is not that every employee must become a technical specialist. Rather, many people need enough digital fluency to understand the tools they use, recognize their limits, and apply human judgment.

As technology speeds up routine work, critical thinking, process improvement, communication, and ethical decision-making can become more important to the quality of the result. Deloitte Insights reports that seven in 10 business leaders identify being fast and nimble as their primary competitive strategy for the next three years. Its research also describes AI as a tool that can help workers learn, adapt, and apply new skills in the flow of work. This makes continuous learning more useful than treating training as a one-time event.

How Skills-Based Hiring Fits In

Skills-based hiring gives greater weight to whether a candidate can perform the work instead of treating degrees, job titles, or a fixed career path as the only signals of readiness. Employers may consider relevant experience, work samples, certifications, demonstrated capabilities, or structured interviews. To make this approach useful, they first need to identify the outcomes, tools, knowledge, and collaboration skills the role actually requires.

Clear requirements can widen the talent pool by recognizing skills gained through military service, community college, apprenticeships, previous roles, independent learning, caregiving, or other experience. They can also replace vague requirements, such as a set number of years in a similar job, with evidence connected to the work. However, skills-based hiring does not mean formal education has no value. A Forbes article on 2026 work trends reports expert expectations that employers will place more emphasis on skills than degrees, while also noting data that bachelor’s degree holders earn approximately 68% more per week than people with only a high school diploma. The practical question is which qualifications and demonstrations of ability are relevant to a particular role.

How Candidates Can Demonstrate Skills

Candidates can make their abilities easier to assess by connecting evidence to the work. A portfolio or work sample, such as a finished project, writing sample, code repository, or design, shows what someone can produce. In a structured interview, a specific account of a situation and the actions taken can show judgment and problem-solving. People whose skills come from nontraditional paths can name the competencies developed through military service, apprenticeships, or community college and explain how those competencies relate to the role.

These methods help employers evaluate demonstrated ability rather than relying only on a résumé or a candidate’s description of their skills. A fair assessment still needs to be tied to the actual requirements of the job.

How Organizations Can Build a Skills Strategy

A useful workforce-skills strategy connects business goals to the work people need to do. It should start with role-specific requirements rather than a generic list of desirable traits. Organizations can build that connection through a series of practical steps:

1. Define the work. Identify the outcomes employees must deliver and the tasks involved before specifying candidate qualifications.
2. Identify current and future gaps. Compare available capabilities with planned technology, customer needs, growth plans, and operational changes.
3. Prioritize the gaps. Decide which capabilities matter most and whether each gap is best addressed through training, coaching, redesigned workflows, internal mobility, or hiring.
4. Make learning part of the job. Give employees opportunities to practice through projects, mentoring, job rotations, and feedback, not only courses.
5. Assess skills consistently. Use structured interviews, work samples, job-relevant exercises, or clear performance criteria rather than assumptions.
6. Review requirements regularly. Update skills profiles as work changes so outdated job descriptions do not lead to mismatched hiring or development decisions.

Employers managing contingent work can apply the same discipline when defining assignments and selecting talent. Clear skill requirements help align a worker’s capabilities with the work to be completed, while changing project needs may make those requirements worth reviewing. TCWGlobal works with employers on talent solutions tied to changing skill requirements.

Applying Skills to Changing Work

Technical expertise helps people perform specific tasks, while human and adaptive skills help them apply that expertise with others and adjust as work evolves. The balance differs by role, so organizations and individuals benefit from focusing on the capabilities connected to actual work rather than relying on broad labels. Reviewing one open role against its expected outcomes can reveal whether the main gap is in technical knowledge, collaboration, adaptability, or the way the work is designed.

*This article is for general informational purposes only and is not legal advice.