What are life skills?

What are life skills? The 10 core skills explained

Life skills are the abilities that help a person manage the demands of everyday life, from making a decision under pressure to working through a disagreement or recovering from a setback, and the World Health Organization groups them into 10 core skills that schools can teach. They carry particular weight for adolescents in low- and middle-income countries, where seven in 10 children cannot read and understand a simple text by age 10, according to the World Bank and UNICEF, and where many young people leave school before they finish.

Room to Read is a nonprofit organization that has championed children's literacy and girls' education since 2000, benefiting more than 60 million children across 29 geographies. Our gender equality programming, which teaches life skills to adolescents through a structured curriculum, has benefited more than 4.5 million adolescents across 14 geographies.

This article explains how life skills are defined, why adolescence is the period when they matter most, which skills a life skills education builds and how those skills are taught in schools, drawing on the evidence from our programs.

The most widely used definition comes from the World Health Organization, which describes life skills as the abilities that allow a person to adapt to the demands and challenges of daily life and respond to them in a positive way. The WHO then set out 10 core skills that apply across cultures, a list that remains the most common reference point for schools and education programs.

The 10 core life skills in the WHO framework

The WHO presents the 10 skills in five related pairs, each covering one area of everyday functioning.

• Decision-making and problem-solving, which help a person weigh options and work through a difficulty step by step

• Creative thinking and critical thinking, which help a person generate alternatives and test assumptions before acting

• Effective communication and interpersonal relationship skills, which help a person express needs and build supportive relationships

• Self-awareness and empathy, which help a person recognize their own strengths and understand the circumstances of others

• Coping with emotions and coping with stress, which help a person respond to pressure without losing sight of their plans

Other frameworks shorten or extend this list, which is why searches turn up lists of five, seven or 12 essential life skills. Nearly all of them return to the same three capacities of thinking clearly, relating to other people and managing oneself.

How life skills are learned

Life skills are learned differently from academic subjects, since a student builds them through practice and reflection in situations that resemble real decisions. That is why life skills education relies on structured activities that are repeated over time.

Why do life skills matter most in adolescence?

The 10 core skills matter at every age, and adolescence is the period when they shape the most consequential choices, because the years of secondary school are also the years when decisions about continuing education, work and marriage begin to be made. For many adolescent girls those decisions arrive under pressure from household responsibilities or the risk of forced marriage, and according to UNESCO, 122 million girls are out of school worldwide.

Academic preparation on its own leaves young people underprepared for these moments. Life skills help adolescents recognize their own worth, strengthen their resilience and build the confidence to keep learning as their circumstances change.

The foundation that comes first

Life skills build on an earlier foundation, since strong literacy skills in the early grades are the basis for all later learning. Life skills in secondary school then equip adolescents with the tools to meet the challenges of young adulthood and make informed choices about their own futures, through a gender-aware lens.

The returns to those choices last well into adulthood. According to the World Bank, each additional year of schooling raises a girl's later earnings by about 20 percent, so skills that help an adolescent make and act on informed decisions about her education carry value long after she leaves school.

Which life skills does life skills education build?

Life skills education turns a general framework such as the WHO list into a sequence of skills that a curriculum can teach and a school can track. Room to Read's life skills curriculum, a seven-year curriculum delivered through our Girls' Education Program, focuses on five domains, which are collaboration, resilience, leadership, decision-making and critical thinking.

The table below sets out what each of the five domains helps an adolescent do.

Two of these domains, decision-making and critical thinking, appear directly in the WHO list, and collaboration, resilience and leadership each draw together several of its interpersonal and self-management skills. For everyday illustrations of each one, our guide to examples of life skills for girls shows how the skills appear in a girl's school and family life.

How are life skills taught in schools?

Because life skills are learned through practice, the way a curriculum is delivered matters as much as the skills it names. At Room to Read, trained mentors from each girl's community lead regular life skills sessions and lessons throughout the school year, using activities such as goal-setting, story circles and role-model interviews.

Practice before the real decision

A goal-setting activity typically asks each participant to name a goal for the coming year, identify what could stand in its way and plan a first step, which is the same decision-making process she will later apply to choices about her own schooling. Because the same mentor works with the same group over time, she can see when a girl is struggling and help her apply a skill to a situation she faces at home.

Resources schools and families can use

Schools and families can bring these methods into their own settings with a single structured session. Our free life skills lesson plan, adapted from our Girls' Education Program, shows how one session moves from discussion to practice.

What Room to Read is

The sessions described above are designed and run by community-based staff, which reflects how we work across all of our programs. Since 2000, our work has been guided by the belief that World Change Starts with Educated Children®, and in 2025 alone our programs actively benefited 17 million children.

Local leadership and independent recognition

Nearly 90 percent of our more than 1,200 staff are based in the countries where we work, and local nationals lead our community-based operations from program design through implementation. That model has earned 20 four-star ratings from Charity Navigator and a place in HundrED's Hall of Fame.

How Room to Read addresses life skills

Our approach follows the order in which children build foundational learning skills, beginning with literacy in the early grades through our Literacy Program and continuing with life skills in secondary school through our Girls' Education Program. That sequence lets each adolescent arrive at the decisions of secondary school with the reading skills to keep learning and the life skills to act on her choices.

Results for adolescents in our program

Our program data show that adolescents who build these skills with steady mentorship go on to advance through school and beyond it. In recent years, over 99 percent of girls enrolled in our Girls' Education Program have advanced to the next grade, and more than 80 percent of graduates secure work or enroll in tertiary education within five years of graduation.

Taking life skills education to national scale

Bringing life skills to more adolescents depends on partnership with governments, so we collaborate with ministries of education to bring what works into national school systems. In Cambodia, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport has adopted our co-educational life skills curriculum for Grades 7–9 nationwide.

According to the Global Education Monitoring Report, only one in six countries is on track to meet its education goals by 2030. Support for our work therefore invests in the systems and partnerships that let life skills education reach adolescents at scale.

How to stay informed

Life skills education continues to develop as new evidence shows which skills and methods help adolescents most, and our program results add to that evidence each year. Our email subscribers receive new research and program results on life skills and girls' education first.

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