What are personal and professional skills?

Personal skills are the skills you use to be a good employee, and professional skills are the skills you use to do your job well. There may be some overlap between the two, but typically personal skills include things like communication and collaboration, while professional skills include coding and data entry.

Another way to differentiate between the two is to refer to personal skills as soft skills and professional skills as hard or technical skills. Soft skills carry over to any industry and are what make you easy to work with, while hard skills are more industry-specific and are what makes you an expert at your job.