The Personal Skills Needed At Work

A soft skills assessment measures how developed a person's non-technical workplace skills currently are. It turns qualities that usually get described in vague performance-review language — "good communicator," "needs to be more strategic" — into named skills with a development level attached to each one. TTI DNA is a soft skills assessment that measures 25 of them, sorted into how a person thinks, works, and relates to others.

What Is a Soft Skills Assessment?

The distinction that matters is between measuring a trait and measuring a skill. A behavioral instrument like DISC describes how someone naturally tends to operate. A soft skills assessment asks a different question: how well developed is this specific capability right now, and what would improve it? That is why soft skills results change with deliberate practice while behavioral style stays relatively stable.

TTI's research team reports that for many jobs, personal skills contribute as much to superior performance as technical skills do, and that personal skills transfer across roles while technical skills usually do not. Supporting research is published at the TTI research portal.

The 25 Soft Skills TTI DNA Measures

Most soft skills content stops at four or five broad buckets — communication, teamwork, problem solving, adaptability. Those buckets are too coarse to coach against. Below is the full list DNA reports on, which is the level of detail a development plan actually needs.

Each skill in the report follows the same four-part structure: what the skill is, how it shows up in daily work, what other people notice when it is strong or weak, and concrete ways to develop it. The format is built for a development conversation, not for a filing cabinet.

Four Ways Organizations Assess Soft Skills

Choosing between them is really a question of what you need the result for. A method that works well for coaching one person often fails when you need to compare thirty.

TTI DNA is a structured skills instrument. It is often paired with EQ or 12 Driving Forces in a multi-science report, because knowing that someone's Conflict Management is underdeveloped is more useful when you also know whether they are motivated to work on it.

Self-Assessment Quiz or Structured Instrument?

This is the question most soft skills searches are actually asking, and the two answers rarely overlap. A quiz is unscored against any norm, cannot be compared between two people who took it, and produces no audit trail. That is fine when the audience is yourself.

An organization has different requirements. If an L&D director is building a leadership program for twelve managers, the useful artifact is a skills map showing that nine of the twelve are underdeveloped in Creating Alignment — which is a curriculum decision, not a coaching insight. That only works if every manager was measured the same way.

Using Soft Skills Assessments in Hiring: What Compliance Requires

This is the part vendors tend to skip, so it is worth stating plainly. No assessment is "EEOC approved," because the EEOC does not approve assessments. What exists instead is a standard: the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, published at 29 CFR Part 1607, which sets out what validity evidence a selection procedure needs and when adverse impact analysis is required. The EEOC's guidance for employers covers the broader obligations.

Two practical consequences follow. First, TTI DNA reports how developed each skill currently is; it does not produce a pass/fail score, and it should not be used as a standalone cutoff for a hiring decision. Second, where soft skills data does inform selection, it belongs inside a structured hiring process that starts from a documented job benchmark, so the skills being weighed are demonstrably the ones the job requires.

TTI publishes its validation approach — content, criterion-related, and construct validity methods — and its position on disparate treatment and disparate impact on the TTI compliance page. Practitioners looking for the professional standard behind all of this can consult the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

Where a Soft Skills Assessment Fits in Your Talent Process

Organizations use TTI DNA across four workflows:

• Hiring and selection — identifying which personal skills a role genuinely depends on, as one input among several.
• Team building — mapping where a team is collectively strong and where a single gap, such as Conflict Management, is affecting everyone.
• Professional development — giving a person a development plan they can act on without waiting for their manager.
• Succession planning — showing the distance between a high performer's current skills and the ones the next role will demand.

DNA is delivered through TTI's Internet Delivery Service and is used in more than 100 countries through a network of over 7,000 partner experts. Consultants and coaches who want to deliver it with their own clients can do so through TTI's certification programs.

Soft Skills Assessment FAQs

What is a soft skills assessment?

A soft skills assessment is a structured measurement of a person's interpersonal, cognitive, and self-management behaviors at work. Unlike a personality test, which describes how someone naturally tends to operate, a soft skills assessment reports how developed each specific skill is right now. TTI DNA measures 25 such skills individually across Thinking, Working, and Relating.

How do you assess soft skills?

Four methods are in common use: situational judgment tests, structured behavioral interviews scored against a rubric, self-assessment questionnaires, and structured skills instruments. For a single person's development, a self-assessment is often enough. For anything requiring comparison across people — team mapping, program design, succession review — a structured instrument scored identically for everyone is the only method that produces comparable data.

How many soft skills does TTI DNA measure?

TTI DNA measures 25 personal skills. Seven fall under Thinking, seven under Working, and eleven under Relating. Each is reported on its own scale from developed to needs development, with an explanation of what the skill is, how it shows up at work, what others notice, and how to develop it.

Can a soft skills assessment be used for hiring?

It can, within limits. Any assessment used in a selection decision is a selection procedure under the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures at 29 CFR Part 1607, which places the burden of demonstrating job-relatedness and monitoring adverse impact on the employer. TTI DNA reports current development level rather than a pass/fail score, and should never be used as a standalone hiring cutoff. Used properly, it is one input inside a structured process built on a documented job benchmark.

What is the difference between soft skills and hard skills?

Hard skills are technical capabilities tied to a specific job, such as operating a piece of software or reading a balance sheet. Soft skills are the personal and interpersonal capabilities that transfer between jobs, such as Conflict Management or Personal Accountability. TTI's research team reports that for many roles, soft skills contribute as much to superior performance as technical ones, which is why they are worth measuring rather than assuming.