Not every skill needed to succeed in your job involves using fancy technology. You also need to be a critical thinker, be able to solve complex problems, and have good coordination skills, among other non-technical skills.
The Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network (O*NET) has a list of the varying importance scores of different skills for each occupation. Each occupation is given an importance score from one to five for each skill. Five is the the maximum score a skill can receive in each job.
Skills on O*NET are classified under six general categories: Basic skills, complex problem solving skills, resource management skills, social skills, systems skills, and technical skills. There are 36 detailed skills within these main categories, such as time management, mathematics, and active listening.
After recently finding the most popular technology skills listed on O*NET across the highest-paying jobs in the US, we decided to look at the most common non-technical skills in those jobs. To do this, we averaged the scores for each skill for 28 of the 30 highest-paying jobs. We excluded two jobs that were categorized as "all other" (undefined roles within dentist specialists, as well as the physician and ophthalmologist categories) because O*NET doesn't list scores for these broader occupation categories.
O*NET includes separate scores scores indicating both the importance of a skill and the level of proficiency needed in that skill for an occupation. O*NET uses the example of lawyers and paralegals where "lawyers (who frequently argue cases before judges and juries) are required to have a higher Level of speaking skill, while paralegals only need an average Level of this skill." For the purposes of our analysis, we focused on the importance score, rather than the level score.
Read on to find out the 15 most commonly required non-technical skills among the highest-paying jobs, along with their average scores. We also included each skill's definition from O*NET and the average annual salaries for the three jobs with the highest score in each skill. In the case of a tied score, we ranked the jobs with the highest average salaries as of May 2019, the most recent data available.