How To List Your Skills
Whether youâre a jack of all trades or a master of one, you absolutely must list some skills on your resume. Skills offer additional insight into what you can offer the company as an employee, and may just push your resume over the edge and into the interview pile.
250+ Skills for Each Industry
How To Include Foreign Language Proficiency In Your Resume
Here are some snippets from a sample resume that can help:
Here are some keywords that can help you stand out:
1. Foreign Languages Known.
- Mention the language that you know.
- Explain your keenness to converse in those language.
2. Language Proficiency.
- Be sure to mention your proficiency.
- It can be beginner, expert, or professional level.
3. Use a foreign language in a fast-paced environment.
- Emphasize how you can help the business by using the language in a dynamic and fast-paced environment.
- Highlight your willingness to put your expertise to good use.
- Mention any past instances where your language proficiency came in handy.
4. Leveraged Command/Expertise.
- Mention instances where you stepped up and used foreign language proficiency in a demanding professional situation.
How To Include Leadership Qualities In Your Resume
You can take advantage of numerous resume-building tools to highlight your leadership skills.
For example, you can simply choose a template by Canva that uses the right keywords to demonstrate your leadership skills:
Resume building tools like Canva come with plenty of templates that come pre-designed with appropriate keywords according to your skill-set.
Some of its key features are:
- It has over 6000 resume templates based on specific industries and skill-set.
- Offers customization of colors, fonts, and layouts.
- You can click and create boxes to add information.
Here are some keywords that can help you highlight your leadership capabilities:
1. Ability to Teach And Mentor.
- Talks about your ability and experience in teaching and mentoring your team members.
- Highlights your willingness to lead a team and can be included in your experience section.
2. Flexibility.
- You can use this word in a sentence in such a way that it explains how you are flexible about your work and can lead from the front.
- Explaining how you are willing to make long-term commitments is good to add to a skill section.
3. Risk-Taker.
- Highlights how you take or have taken calculated risks in the workplace.
4. Team-Builder.
- It explains your ability to select the right employees to build a responsible and responsive team.
- Here, you can also highlight previous such experiences, either in academic or professional life.
5. Time Management.
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Look For Target Keywords
If youre still not sure if any of these skills are right for your situation, one quick way to check which skills the employer is seeking is to check the job description.
Read through it a few times and youll likely spot three or four key skills mentioned several times throughout the document. If thats the case, you should do your best to focus on those skills in your resume, too.
How To Include Adaptability And Flexibility Skills In Your Resume
Here are some terms to include in your resume:
1. Open to New Trends.
- Emphasize how youre open to new trends, ideas, and challenges in the workplace and how it makes you a better employee.
2. High Adjustability.
- It highlights your adjusting demeanor and willingness to tackle new challenges.
3. Problem-Solver.
- Use this term and explain your positive attitude towards problems and how devising and implementing solutions drive you.
4. Ability to Handle Pressure.
- It highlights your ability to soak up pressure and work in stressful situations. Here, you can briefly explain how working on a deadline enhances your performance.
5. Acknowledge Others.
- Emphasize how well you can work in teams and are the first to acknowledge the efforts of others.
- Highlight how you believe in sharing the credit, and how youve done so in the past.
6. Culture Fit.
- It explains how your adaptability and flexibility make you an asset in the workplace.
- Here, you can also point out how you can seamlessly fit into the specific company you want to join.
- Highlight the term culture fit and how your career goals align with the mission and vision of the company.
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List Your Skills In A Separate Skills Section
If you want to support your professional experience with skills that are required by or relevant to the employer, you could include a separate skills section that highlights keywords from the job description. If you have extensive professional experience, your job history section should be highlighted as the first thing employers see. You can list additional skills in a separate section at or near the bottom of your resume.
Here is an example skills section for a payroll specialist:
*Relevant skills: Mastery of Quicken and Quickbooks, employee benefits administration, new hire onboarding, multistate payroll, employee relations.*
Match Your Skills To The Job
Taking the time to make a match will show the hiring manager why you’re qualified for a job and worth interviewing. Employers want to see that you have what it takes to succeed in the job. Theyll use the skills you list on your resume to rank your qualifications for the job against those of your competition.
When you include skills on your resume, be specific. Show the employer that you have the skills they are seeking.
The better a match you are for the job, the better chance you will have of being chosen for an interview. Depending on the job for which you’re applying, there are some skills you don’t need to include. Here’s a list of skills you shouldn’t put on your resume.
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How Do You Choose The Skills To List On A Resume
Heres the deal.
You know what youre good at. You know the things you grew up doing as a kid, or the things you learned in school , or the activities you did after school .
So you should already have a list of things that you would consider yourself proficient in.
This is a good place to start.
Here are the steps for choosing the right skills:
Identify Your Key Skills
Make a list of your strongest skills. Ideally, these are workplace skills however, donât rule out personality traits, academic skills, or skills from volunteer work and side hustles.
Having trouble? Try mulling over these prompts.
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What types of things do you do every day? What tools or talents help you perform those tasks?
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What are you better at than most other people?
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What skills have you used to make an impact in your past jobs?
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What hard skills do you most enjoy using at work?
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What sort of traits do people compliment you on?
You can also try taking some free career assessments for inspiration.
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Simple Resume Writing Tips To Help You Stand Out
Your resume is the most important document you’ll submit in your job search. It’s your front-line fighter, so to speak, as it’s your first opportunity to present yourself to a potential employer.
A strong resume can help you stand out from the crowd, but a weak resume can remove you from the running, so you want to do all you can to make sure your resume is the best it can be.
It can be difficult to succinctly present all of your experiences and qualifications, but there are many ways to spruce up your resume without going overboard. To help you land an interview, Business News Daily rounded up some of the experts’ best resume writing tips.
What Are Your Top 3 Skills
Hiring managers commonly ask interviewees what their top three skills are. Formulate the perfect answer by identifying three of the most important skills you have. Make sure theyre listed in the job description.
You can categorize them into one hard skill, one soft skill and one technical skill for bonus points. Prepare examples of how you executed those skills, and theres your perfect answer.
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Mentioning Leadership Skills In A Cover Letter
The free-flowing nature of a cover letterallows for more of a human aspect to your leadership story. While a resume is traditionally more factual, a cover letter covers more of the behavioral side.
The stories that you choose to tell should closely align with the types of leadership situations that you will face in your new role. Dont hesitate to change your cover letter if you feel that certain types of behavior might not be common. There is nothing worse for a potential employer than reading a cover letter and thinking Well, that sort of thing doesnt happen here often. Leadership skills are great if they are the right leadership skills.
Choose suitable action verbsto give your leadership stories some extra weight and make sure that you quantify your contribution as clearly as possible . True leaders dont make it all about them.
Tip : Match The Skills Listed On Your Resume To The Job Description
Remember to always tailor your resume to the job youre targeting. Only include relevant soft skills for your resume that the job description explicitly or implicitly asks for. Customizing your resume specific to the job offer shows the recruiters that you know what the job entails. It also helps ATS bots accurately scan the keywords of soft skills on your resume.
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Make A Soft Skills List
Before you go on to write your resume or cover letter, consider making a list of your skills in the beginning.
Divide your skills into two obvious categories – hard skills and soft skills.
When you compile your soft skills this way, you dont miss out on anything, and it becomes easy to choose the suitable soft skills you must include in your resume.
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How To Include Skills Throughout Your Resume
Now that you know the top skills to put on a resume, use them to your advantage throughout your application.
There are three places on your resume where you can include professional skills:
Lets explore how to add skills to each of these key resume sections, and their respective benefits.
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Lets Start With Why Resume Skills Are Important
Recruiters and hiring managers can see hundreds or even thousands of resumes each day. In their search to find the best candidates, they look first and foremost at skills and ask: Does this candidates skill set match the job requirements?
Additionally, many companies, including 99% of Fortune 500 companies, employ an applicant tracking system to streamline the hiring process. An ATS sorts and ranks resumes based on important keywords, primarily hard skills.
Thats why highlighting the right job skills on your resume is vital to getting the job. If its not immediately apparent that you have the right skills for the position, your resume could beand likely will bepassed over.
Identify And List Down Your Various Skills
The first step is to identify your various hard and soft skills and list them down on a piece of paper or on a spreadsheet. Next, grade your proficiency level in each hard skill.
You have to be very honest in your assessment because your skill ranking will help you determine the types of jobs you should apply for. Once youve graded your proficiency level, arrange the hard skills from highest to lowest.
As mentioned earlier, assessing soft skills is much more difficult. It will take more introspection and deeper evaluation to determine which soft skills you can confidently call your own.
Try to recall challenging experiences from your past and pinpoint the key attributes which helped you resolve or overcome the situations. Similar to hard skills, arrange these soft skills according to your level of confidence in having them.
Keep in mind the Hiring Manager may ask you to take behavioral profiling tests. You have to be honest when assessing your soft skills.
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Choose Resume Skills That Are As Specific As Possible
The last criterion for choosing your job skills is specificity.
Some skills are universal and can apply to almost any role, such as problem-solving skills, communication skills, and familiarity with Microsoft Office.
You can include these if youd like, but they dont tell the hiring manager as much as more specific skills do.
For example, “communication skills” is a vague soft skill.
Use ProWritingAids Word Explorer to help you make this vague skill more specific. The common 2-word phrase suggestions are particularly useful in this situation.
Instead of “communication skills,” you can say “personal communication,” “verbal communication,” or “mass communication.”
Similarly, “programming languages” is a vague hard skill. Instead of “programming languages,” you can say “Javascript,” “Python,” “HTML” or the other specific programming languages youve used in the past.
Use The Right Language To Stand Out
Trite, lackluster descriptions of your job duties and accomplishments won’t do you any favors. Make sure you’re using strong action words like “achieved,””designed,””improved” and “established” to describe your roles and projects, said Sade. This, he said, will make you sound confident while imparting vital information. But be cautious about depending on action verbs make sure to include details about how you improved a process or achieved a goal.
“Words such as ‘professional,”results-driven’ and ‘detail-oriented’ provide very little helpful information,” Sade said. “It’s better to use actual job titles than these words.”
Diya Obeid, founder and CEO of applicant tracking software company JobDiva, also said that you should remove buzzwords like “go-getter,””team player” and “go-to person” from your resume. These come off as fluff and only take up precious space on your resume.
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How To Include Computer Technology And Programming Languages In Your Resume
Here are some keywords and transferable skills you can include to score brownie points with employers:
1. Languages Known.
- Mention any programming languages that you know , along with your proficiency.
2. Projects Completed.
- Mention previous projects youve completed with your earlier employers.
- Highlight the languages you used.
3. Helped Write Code.
- Mention instances when you helped write and execute difficult pieces of code.
- Explain how it helped your employer with unique computer skills.
4. Performed Feasibility Studies.
- Mention instances when you used your proficiency to study the feasibility of a project.
5. Implementation Decision.
- Highlight cases where you determined whether the implementation of a program was feasible or not.
- Explain how your technical skills helped your organization with metrics to back it up.
Customize Your Resume Skills Section
Customize the skills section of your resume to match, as much as you can, the requirements listed in the job posting. The closer a match your skills are to the job requirements, the better your chances are for being selected for an interview.
For example, if you are applying for an administrative position, include in your skills section Microsoft Office skills, QuickBooks skills , and other software programs you can use. If you are a computer programmer, list the programming languages, software, platforms, and other Information Technology skills you have.
Having a skills section makes it easy for a hiring manager to pinpoint if you have a specific skill required for a position. It is also an easy way to get resume keywords onto your resume.
Many employers utilize automated applicant tracking systems to scan candidate resumes these systems are programmed to search for specific keywords.
The more keywords your resume can match, the more likely it is that your resume will be selected for review by human eyes.
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How To Include Your Top Skills On Your Resume
In the resume writing world, there are two types of skills: hard skills vs soft skills. The main difference is that hard skills are objective and soft skills are subjective.
This difference is important.
âThe best resumes contain a strong combination of both hard and soft skills. The hiring manager needs to know that not only can you do the job well but that your personality will be a good fit,â says Jennifer.
âYou want to make it easy for the hiring manager to find your qualifications. Your resume should have a âCore Competenciesâ section where you can list your hard skills and tailor them for the specific job you are applying to. Then, you want to integrate your soft skills throughout the Summary and Work Experience sections.â
To better explain this, letâs split up our list of the 10 most important skills into hard skills and soft skills. This time, weâll talk about why each skill is important and how you should include it on your resume.