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Resources
Identifies, organizes, plans, and allocates resources.

• Time: selects goal-relevant activities, ranks them, allocates time, and prepares and follows schedules.
• Money: uses or prepares budgets, makes forecast, keeps records, and makes adjustments to meet objectives.
• Material and facilities: acquires, stores, allocates, and uses materials and space efficiently.
• Human resources: assesses skills and distributes work accordingly, evaluates performance, and provides feedback.

Interpersonal
Works with others.

• Participants as member of a team: contributes to group efforts.
• Teaches others new skills.
• Serves clients and customers: works to satisfy customers' expectation.
• Exercises leadership: communicates existing procedures and policies.
• Negotiates: works towards agreements involving exchange of resources, and resolves divergent interest.
• Works with diversity: works well with men and women from diverse backgrounds.

Information
Acquires and uses information.

• Acquires and evaluates information.
• Organizes and maintains information.
• Interprets and communicates information.
• Uses computers to process information.

System
Understands complex inter-relationships

• Understands systems: know how social, organizational, and technological systems work and operates effectively with them.
• Monitors and corrects performance: distinguishes trends, predicts impacts on system operations, diagnoses deviations in systems' performance, and corrects malfunctions.
• Improves or designs systems: suggests modifications to existing systems and develop new or alternative systems to improve performance.

Technology
Works with a variety of technologies.

• Selects technology: chooses procedures, tools, or equipment including computers and related technologies.
• Applies technology task: understands overall intent and proper procedures for setup and operation of equipment.
• Maintains and troubleshoots equipment: prevents, identifies, or solves problems with equipment, including computers and other technologies.

Foundation Skills

Basic skills:
Reads, writes, performs arithmetic and mathematical operations, listens, and speaks.

• Reading: locates, understands, and interprets written information in prose and in documents such as manuals, graphs, and schedules.
• Writing: communicates thoughts, ideas, information, and messages in writing; and creates documents such as letters, directions, manuals, reports, graphs, and flow charts.
• Arithmetic/Mathematics: performs basic computations and approaches practical problems by choosing appropriately from a variety of mathematical techniques.
• Listening: receives, attends to, interprets, and responds to verbal messages and other cues.
• Speaking: organizes ideas and communicates orally.

Thinking skills:
Thinks creatively, makes decisions, solves problems, visualizes, knows how to learn and reason.

• Creative thinking: generates new ideas.
• Decision making: specifies goals and constraints, generates alternatives, considers risk, and evaluates and chooses best alternatives.
• Problem solving: recognizes problems and devises and implements plan of action.
• Seeing things in the mind's eye: organizes, and processes symbols, pictures, graphs, objects and other information.
• Knowing how to learn: uses efficient learning techniques to acquire and apply new knowledge and skills.
• Reasoning: discovers a rule of principle underlying the relationship between two or more objects and applies it in solving a problem.

Personal qualities:
Displays responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, and integrity and honesty.

• Responsibility: exerts a high level of effort and perseveres towards goal attainment.
• Self-esteem: believes in own self-worth and maintains a positive self.
• Sociability: demonstrates understanding, friendliness, adaptability, empathy in group settings.
• Self-Management: assesses self accurately, sets personal goals, monitors progress.
• Integrity/Honesty: chooses ethical courses of action

Source: Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) (1991, June).