The model below gives you the co-relation between your career path and the skill sets that are essential for you to do well and excel at that level.
At the entry level, you are mostly selected based on your technical skills and qualifications since the job content is mostly routine or repetitive work requiring specific use of the knowledge that qualification entails. Although at this level your people dealing skills may not be very relevant, however the HR would do well to select those of you who, in addition to technical qualification, show glimmers of qualities that lead to good people skills like good communications, empathy and sound value system. This is essential in the long run, to create a strong organically grown organisation and a great culture.
As time passes and the organisation grows, you would grow with it. From high performing individual you should turn into a good team player and then slowly into a team leader. All this while, a gradual shift occurs from having just technical skills to handling more and more people. As your responsibility increases, the span of your control grows and people handling processes become more and more complex. At this level it is essential that you possess both people skills as well as other technical skills in almost equal proportions or rather you have to be equally adept at both. All of you at this level collectively would form the middle management of the organisation. This is the backbone or the main stay of any organisation comprising of individuals who are both supporting and driving the top management’s mission accomplishment and vision realisation as well as developing and driving the bottom half of the organisation.
Beyond middle management, your reliance on people skills vis-a-vis technical skills increases disproportionately. It also assumes a very complex character and hence you need more and more time and practice for development and implementation. As the apex is reached, you as organisational heads and CEOs, your main job ultimately becomes to get the right man for the right job and how to achieve it and sustain it.
There are no specific numbers suggested for X and Y in the model and these would vary depending on the nature of the industry and type of organisation, but then only slightly. The broad pattern of skill proportions and how they change with your career path would invariably follow the same pattern.