O*NET OnLine Help Soft Skills Custom List

Many employers value workers with soft skills—interpersonal and thinking skills needed to interact successfully with people and to perform efficiently and effectively in the workplace. The Soft Skills Custom List function is designed to help you use your skill set to identify occupations for exploration. You select a set of social or thinking skills you have, or plan to work on developing.

In the example below, the user selects "Negotiation," "Persuasion," and "Social Perceptiveness" to find occupations which use these skills.

Example view in context

See examples
Adjusting actions in relation to others' actions.
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Teaching others how to do something.
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Bringing others together and trying to reconcile differences.
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Persuading others to change their minds or behavior.
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Actively looking for ways to help people.
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Being aware of others' reactions and understanding why they react as they do.

To see specific examples of any of the skills, click the See examples icon. After completing and submitting your choices, click the Go button to view occupations with related skills, as in the example below:

  • Export the full list of occupations to Excel or CSV with the Save Table links.
  • Filter the occupations to show only those in a selected Job Zone by clicking one of the Show Job Zones buttons.
  • Sort the occupation list by clicking any column header. Click the header a second time to reverse the sort order.
Skills Covered — This percentage indicates how many of this occupation's high-level soft skills were selected in your custom list. If the "Skills Covered" number is less than 100%, you may need to develop additional soft skills in order to perform well in this occupation. Click on the number to see which soft skills you selected, and which others you may need to develop.

My Matches — Your selected soft skills are compared to skill ratings for each occupation. If a selected skill is rated high-level for a particular occupation, it is considered a match. The higher the "My Matches" number, the more likely an occupation will make full use of your selected skills.

High-level — Soft skills are considered "high-level" for an occupation if the Level rating in the O*NET Database is at least 50 on the standardized scale (3.5 on the original Level scale).

For any occupation listed, select its title to see more information about the corresponding occupation. For more information on these options, see OnLine Help for Summary, Details, or Custom Report.