The 6 Skills UK Employers Named After a 5-Year Study of What Gets You Hired

The National Foundation for Educational Research has identified six transferable skills that it expects to count as much as qualifications in getting and keeping a job over the coming decade, in a major five year study reported by the BBC on August 27. The six are organizing and planning, problem solving and decision making, communication, collaboration, creative thinking, and the ability to evaluate data. If you are writing applications and wondering what actually gets read, that list is the most evidence backed answer currently available. At Metaintro, we care less about naming skills than about how you prove you have them, so this piece is mostly about evidence.

What Did the NFER Study Actually Find?

The headline finding is a reordering rather than a discovery. NFER's position is not that qualifications stop mattering, but that these six transferable skills will count as much as qualifications in both getting and keeping a job in the coming decade. Keeping is the word to notice. Most careers advice concentrates on getting hired, while the research is describing what holds a job through a period of change.

The study is unusually substantial. Five years of work on what the labor market will require means this is not a snapshot survey of hiring managers taken in one quarter, and that matters when you are deciding what to invest your own time in. Employers interviewed by the BBC described the same list from the inside, across a UK clothing brand, a bar business and a large infrastructure contractor, which is a spread of sectors that rarely agree on anything.

Why These Six Skills and Not Others?

Because of what NFER expects to happen to the work itself. Its earlier research, published in the Skills Imperative 2035 report, suggests it may become harder to find a job as AI and automation could see up to three million low to mid level jobs disappear by 2035.

Read those two findings together and the logic becomes clear. If three million roles at the low to mid level are at risk, then the skills worth having are the ones that survive the transition and transfer across it. As one contributor to the BBC piece put it, it is increasingly likely that during the course of your working life you might have to make some fairly dramatic changes in what you are doing as your job gets replaced by technology. The six skills are not chosen because they are pleasant. They are chosen because they move with you.

That framing matters for how you read the list. These are not soft skills in the dismissive sense. They are the portable part of your working capability, and we have made the same argument in the resume skills AI cannot replace and in our guide to transferable skills in customer service.

How Do You Show You Can Organize, Plan and Prioritize?

The BBC piece frames this as knowing how to organize, plan and prioritize, and one manager's description of the reality is the most useful thing in it. Describing what the job actually involves, he listed organization, ordering beer, pricing beer, planning social media, marketing and recruiting. That is a bar job, and it contains six workstreams competing for the same hours.

Which is exactly why this skill is assessed and rarely claimed well. Nearly every applicant writes that they are organized. Almost none of them show the shape of the problem they were organizing. The fix on a resume is to name the competing demands and the rule you used to choose between them. Instead of saying you managed multiple priorities, say you ran ordering, rota and social media for a site doing a specific volume, and that stock ordering took precedence on delivery days because a stockout cost more than a delayed post.

Note also what the manager's list implies about progression. As people get promoted they are expected to take on more responsibilities and manage them within the role, so this skill is the one that determines whether a promotion works. Our guide to time management techniques covers the mechanics, and how to write a resume skills section covers the presentation.

What Does Problem Solving and Decision Making Look Like on Paper?

NFER pairs these two deliberately, and the pairing is the insight. Problem solving without decision making produces analysis that never resolves. Decision making without problem solving produces confident guesses. Employers want the sequence, which is identifying the real problem, generating options, choosing one and living with the consequence.

The distinction is worth understanding properly, and we set it out in critical thinking versus problem solving and in analytical thinking versus critical thinking. On an application, the thing that lands is a decision you made under incomplete information, including what you gave up by making it. Interviewers are trained to probe the tradeoff, because the tradeoff is where the real reasoning lives.

Practice the shape before you need it. Problem solving interview questions and our critical thinking exercises are both built around producing that structure under time pressure, which is the condition you will be assessed in.

How Do Employers Actually Test Communication?

Less formally than you would expect. A general manager quoted by the BBC said developing communication skills is key in a busy bar, which sounds obvious until you consider what a busy bar demands, which is precision under noise and time pressure with an audience that is not paying attention. That is a harder communication environment than most offices.

The BBC piece also frames good communication as building relationships and reducing conflict, and the second half is the part candidates neglect. Employers are not only asking whether you can present. They are asking whether things get worse when you are in the room. An example of a disagreement you defused is worth more than an example of a presentation you delivered, because the first is rarer and harder to fake.

One person interviewed traced her ability to think on her feet to time spent in a university debating society, which is a useful reminder that the evidence does not have to come from paid work. The wider point about why this is rising in value is one we covered in why human communication still wins at work even as AI writes the emails.

Why Is Collaboration the One They Ask About Directly?

Because it is the most reliable proxy for everything else, and one HR director said so almost explicitly. What her company looks for when hiring is how people can talk about their own experiences of collaboration. Then she went further, in the single most useful line for any applicant reading this, saying candidates might not have the specific experience needed for the role, but that they look more at those transferable skills.

That is an employer at a well known clothing brand stating publicly that missing the exact experience is survivable if the transferable evidence is strong. Anyone screening themselves out of applications for lacking a listed requirement should read that twice.

The practical implication is that your collaboration example needs to be a real account rather than a claim. Name what the disagreement was, what your specific contribution was, and what the other people contributed, because a story where you did everything is not a collaboration story. Another contributor described the coordination involved as keeping people in the loop, communicating with not only the warehouse but also the factory and the shipping team, which is exactly the right level of specificity. We covered the future facing version of this in AI, teamwork and the future of collaboration.

Where Does Creative Thinking Actually Show Up?

Not where most people assume. The BBC frames it as creative thinking uncovering solutions, which locates it in problem solving rather than in design or the arts. This is the skill applicants most often assume does not apply to them, and the assumption costs them.

Creative thinking in this sense means producing a second option when the obvious one is blocked. A warehouse worker who reroutes a shipment when a supplier fails is doing it. So is an administrator who redesigns a form because the same question keeps getting answered wrong. Neither would call it creativity, and both should, because that is what the research means.

It is also the skill employers are increasingly explicit about valuing over narrow technical ability, a shift we tracked in hiring managers prioritizing creativity over coding. The reason connects back to automation. Routine execution is the part machines take first, so the part that stays human is deciding what to do when the routine does not fit.

Why Does Evaluating Data Matter Even in Non Technical Roles?

Because raw data does not, in the words of one people director quoted in the piece, tell a story. Her company delivers infrastructure projects across energy, defense and rail, and her point was that workers need to be able to evaluate data rather than simply produce or receive it.

This is the sixth skill and the one most likely to be misread as a request for technical qualifications. It is not asking whether you can build a model. It is asking whether you can look at a number and tell whether it means anything, which is a judgment skill. Can you spot that a rise is seasonal rather than real, that a sample is too small to conclude from, or that two figures are not comparable because they measure different periods.

That capability is becoming more valuable precisely as AI makes producing data effortless. When anyone can generate a chart in seconds, the scarce skill is knowing which chart is misleading. It also sits underneath the wider concern we covered in AI tanking critical thinking skills and what employers are doing about it, and in our practical guide to critical thinking skills.

Do These Skills Replace Qualifications?

No, and it is worth being precise since the finding is easy to overstate. NFER's claim is that these six will count as much as qualifications, not instead of them. For regulated professions, licensed trades and roles with legal requirements, the qualification remains the gate and no amount of collaboration evidence substitutes for it.

What changes is the weighting for everything else. If a qualification gets you considered and these six determine whether you are chosen and whether you last, then the sensible strategy is to stop treating the qualification as the finish line. The pressure this puts on education is real, and the BBC notes increasing pressure for schools, colleges and universities to focus on making young people work ready alongside academic learning. That gap is one we examined in closing the skills gap through employer and educator collaboration.

For career changers, the finding is straightforwardly good news. If transferable skills carry as much weight as credentials, then years spent in another sector are an asset rather than a deficit, provided you can evidence them properly.

What Does This Mean for Your Career Right Now?

Audit your application against the six. Take your current resume and find the specific evidence for organizing and prioritizing, problem solving and decision making, communication, collaboration, creative thinking and evaluating data. Most resumes cover two or three by accident and leave the rest as adjectives. The gaps you find are the ones to fix first, and they are usually fixable from experience you already have rather than experience you need to go and get.

Convert claims into accounts. The pattern that works is situation, your specific action, and the outcome with a number where one exists. Six short accounts, one per skill, will serve you across nearly every application and interview you face this year. Write them once, properly, and reuse them. Our behavioral interview questions guide covers the delivery.

Apply anyway when you lack the listed experience. An HR director has said plainly that the specific experience is not the deciding factor and the transferable skills are. Self rejection is the most expensive habit in job hunting, and this research is a direct argument against it.

Use non work evidence where it is genuine. A debating society produced the thinking on her feet that one person carried into an infrastructure career. Volunteering, sport, caring responsibilities and side projects all generate real evidence of collaboration, prioritization and problem solving. What matters is that the account is specific, not that the setting was paid.

And plan for the change the research is warning about. Up to three million low to mid level jobs disappearing by 2035 is a forecast rather than a certainty, but it points in one direction, and the six skills are the hedge against it precisely because they move with you when a role does not survive. At Metaintro, we would rather you build the portable half of your capability deliberately than discover its value the year you need it.

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People Also Asked

Q: What are the six skills the NFER study identified?

A: Organizing, planning and prioritizing, problem solving and decision making, communication, collaboration, creative thinking, and the ability to evaluate data. The study describes them as transferable skills expected to count as much as qualifications in getting and keeping a job over the coming decade.

Q: Do transferable skills really matter more than experience?

A: They matter alongside it. An HR director quoted in the BBC coverage said candidates might not have the specific experience needed for a role, and that her company looks more at those transferable skills. That is a reason to apply when you are missing a listed requirement rather than to skip the qualification entirely.

Q: How many jobs could disappear to automation by 2035?

A: NFER research suggests up to three million low to mid level jobs could disappear by 2035 as AI and automation advance. That forecast is the reasoning behind the six skills, since the research treats portability and adaptability as the protection against a role being replaced.

Make your resume work for you by evidencing what employers actually assess rather than what they list. Metaintro matches your transferable skills to roles across sectors, including the ones where your exact job title has never appeared before. Create your free profile and find out where your six skills already qualify you.