How To Showcase Your Skills On Your Resume
A resume is your opportunity to tout your accomplishments. It summarizes all of the things that make you unique: your skills, experiences, accomplishments, and achievements. Of course, resumes do also happen to be space-challenged, so you have to pick and choose what to include.
That leaves you with a bit of a conundrum: What skills to put on your resume? Which skills are must-haves, and which ones can you skip? Are some skills more sought after or more important than others?
Top Skills To Add To Your Resume
There are currently 7.8 billion people on Earth and the number this about to touch 8 billion in 2023, and 10 billion by 2056.
Unfortunately, the number of jobs isnt increasing fast enough to keep up with the growing population.
Furthermore, statistics suggest that 174 million people are likely to be unemployed globally by the end of 2020.
Theres a lot of competition for job seekers and the right opportunities during a job search can be hard to come by.
Most employers get thousands of job applications, and it isnt possible to pore over every single one of them for lack of time. So, modern-day companies use a system called the Applicant Tracking System.
Employers initially select the resumes that show positive hits for specific keywords, no matter how irrelevant they may later turn out to be.
And due to this, many relevant candidates end up getting rejected outright due to the lack of required keywords in their resume.
Thats why creating the right resume isnt a simple task anymore.
This guide will cover the best skills to add to your resume to get more job opportunities this year. This skills list covers what to add to your resume skills section so that you can go from seeing a job posting to getting hired.
Let’s get started.
You Have Only One Or Two Pages To Earn An Interview Make Your Resume Skills Compelling By Including The Right Skills In The Right Way
One of your resumeâs main functions is to show off your skills. Modern resumes need to include the right skills to quickly prove to a hiring managerâand an applicant tracking systemâthat you are worth contacting.
By skills, we mean the technical and interpersonal abilities you need to thrive as a candidate. Youâre a talented and qualified applicantâhow do you choose the best skills to put on your resume?
Employers are looking for applicants who have both hard skills and soft skills. However, there are different ways you should talk about these job skills and include them on your resume.
Hard skills are specific and usually required to succeed in a job. You can describe how youâve used your hard skills to achieve certain results, using metrics and numbers. You may also describe your hard skills as certifications, test scores, or with examples of your work.
Soft skills canât be easily measured and are often open to interpretation. To display your ability, you need to offer examples of how youâve used your soft skills to succeed. Add these to your work experience section as bullet points or descriptive sentences.
Adding a skills section is a good start, but there are other tricks to getting your resumeâs specific skills noticed. Thereâs no secret recipe to make your resume universally irresistible to employers. There are simply too many hiring professionals looking for different kinds of people to solve different kinds of problems.
Recommended Reading: Cna Cover Letter With No Experience
Best Synonym Suggestions For Your Resume & Cover Letter
Looking for a synonym or another way to articulate common words or phrases on your resume;or in your cover letter?
Good. And heres why:
Many common phrases are overused buzzwords that will likely annoy the reader, as they see them time and time again.
You need to be able to stand out from the crowd by finding new and varied ways to get your message across without using stock words that every other applicant has used.
Even better than finding synonyms for commonly used words, you should try to use your resume or cover letter to demonstrate through real-life examples the traits you are trying to convey.
Top Resume Skills By Job
Our team parsed over 8 million recent job descriptions to find the most commonly requested skills for each job type listed below. To find out more about this projectand which skills to include on your resumecheck out our skills reports.
Below youll find the most commonly required skills for:
Also Check: Resume Typing Speed
Hard Skills To Include On Your Resume
Hard skills are usually technical and often related to a specific field.
For example, hard skills can include:
- Programming or coding
- Foreign language skills
Even something that seems less technical, like writing, is a hard skill. Stellar writing skills play an extremely important role in modern business. Between email, instant messaging, social media, the ability to craft a clear, concise, and coherent written message is an increasingly sought-after technical skill.
While most hard skills are industry-specific, there are a few hard skills most employers want in applicants.
Project Management Skills
Even if your job title has never included project manager, your ability to manage the flow of tasks and see things through from start to finish is invaluable in any field.
Administrative Skills
Planning, organizing, scheduling, and managing files are all administrative skills that employers often want in their employees.
Computer Skills
Though programming is a hard skill, your technical abilities with multiple software programs is an invaluable hard skillparticularly if you want a remote job! That said, computer skills is broad, so be sure to specify which tools youre familiar with.
Why Are Skills So Important On My Resume
Three words: Applicant Tracking Systems.
Nearly all companies use Applicant Tracking Systems to filter through resumes. These systems scan through resumes to look for specific keywords, such as certain skills necessary for the job.
The ATS scan summarizes your skills based on the keywords you chose. If the skills section of your resume doesnât exactly match the job description, your resume may be rejected before it ever reaches a human.
Don’t Miss: When Do You Use A Resume
Your Personal Brand Is Essential For Your Career Success
In her article, Why Personal Branding Is More Important Than Ever, Caroline Castrillon outlines key reasons why a personal brand is essential for career success.
According to Castrillon,
One reason is that it is more popular for recruiters to use social media during the interview process. According to a 2018 CareerBuilder survey, 70% of employers use social media to screen candidates during the hiring process, and 43% of employers use social media to check on current employees.
The first thing I do as a recruiter when I want to check out a candidate or coaching client is to look them up on LinkedIn or other social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Your digital footprint is the window that highlights to the world who you are. When you have no control over how you want to be seen, you are making a big mistake because you are leaving it up to someone else to make a judgment for you as to who you are.
As Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, once said, Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.
In her book, Becoming, Michelle Obama writes about the importance of having a personal brand and her journey to defining her personal brand. She wrote that:
if you dont get out there and define yourself, youll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.
When you have a personal brand, you are in control. You know exactly what people will say about you when you leave the room.
How Do U Handle Pressure
Balance interesting tasks with more mundane ones, and stressful tasks with those you find easier or can do more calmly. Try not to do too much at once. If you take on too much, you might find it harder to do any individual task well. This can make you feel like you have even more pressure on you.
Read also
Don’t Miss: How To Put Publications On Resume
The 10 Best Skills To Put On Your Resume In 2021
These 10 items are the most important skills to put on your resume, according to our team of experienced hiring managers and career experts. If you have experience with these skills, you should definitely include them on your resume.
However, you canât simply put this list into your resumeâs skills section. Instead, this guide will walk you through how to use these skills on your resume correctly, and how to make the most of each one.
Here are three steps to get started.
Skills To List On Your Resume
Although the exact content of your resume depends on your experience and the job for which you are applying, there are a few top skills that almost all employers want to see listed. To improve your chance of success in your next job search, list the following hard and soft top skills on your resume.
1. Problem solving: Almost every job involves some element of problem solving. Whether you want to work as part of a sales team or as a software developer, it is almost certain that a problem will develop at some point during your career. When that occurs, you need to have the necessary skills to think on your feet and find an acceptable solution to the problem.
2. Communication: There are almost no jobs that do not involve communicating with others. That’s why all employers are looking for communication skills on your resume. Depending on the job for which you are applying, you might want to explicitly state that your oral or written communication skills are strong.
3. Teamwork: The ability to work with other people is one of the top skills in the workplace. Use your resume to highlight times when you successfully worked as part of a team.
4. Flexibility: Being able to adapt to new situations and environments is important for professional success. Make sure your resume demonstrates your ability to be flexible among your top skills.
You May Like: How To Make A Resume On Word
What Are Adaptability Skills
Adaptability skills are qualities that allow you to adjust to changes in your environment. Being adaptable at work can mean you can respond quickly to changing ideas, responsibilities, expectations, trends, strategies and other processes. Being adaptable also means possessing soft skills like interpersonal, communication, creative thinking and problem-solving skills.
Being adaptable can be important when working on projects, developing strategies and implementing different approaches to meeting goals. By showing adaptability skills, you reveal how motivated you are to try new things and learn new skills.
Read more:Soft Skills: Definitions and Examples
Applicable Certificates Or Degrees
If you earned a certificate or degree, that hard skill has earned a place on your resume. Even if your degree is in a different field from the one you currently work in, your education shows that you are hard-working and committed. You should put these types of hard skills in a section titled âEducationâ or âEducation and Certifications.â
When the job posting description includes certifications or degrees as a requirement, be sure to include them on your resume. If you donât meet these requirements, you may want to hold off applying for this type of job until you have earned them.
Notice that this item says âapplicable,â though: there are cases when your education might not help your resume, such as in these examples:
-
An expired realtorâs license from 15 years ago is not going to help you become the next technical writer for toaster ovens. You can safely leave that out of your skills section.
-
Your high school diploma is implied if you hold an associate, bachelor, or other higher degree. Save the space for another skill.
-
Multiple certifications on similar topics might make your resume look cluttered. Pick your top three based on issuing entity, recency, or preference and add the other ones to your LinkedIn.
If you donât have the training or experience an employer wants, you can always learn a new hard skill! Unlike soft skills, which are mostly innate, hard skills can be acquired and improved all the time.
Also Check: How To Make A Cover Page For A Resume
How To Get Past The Ats: Customize Your Resume Skills For Each Job
The best skills to include on a resume are the required skills that are present in the job description.
For example, if youre applying for a job in Customer Support, the job description might include skills like IT, Stripe, Zendesk, troubleshooting, etc. These hard skills and software then become the top skills for your resume.
I know what youre thinking, and yes, that means each job you apply for requires its own unique set of resume skills. You should update your resume for every job you apply to after reviewing the job description. A one-size-fits-all resume does not work in the world of online job applications and ATS.
Want to see if youve included the most important resume skills for the job youre applying to? Scan your resume and the job description side-by-side in Jobscan.
What Not To Do When Writing Skills For Your Resume
Now that you know what you should do when listing the skills on your resume, lets cover a few important points on what you might want to avoid doing. As in any first impression, its important to make sure that you dont come on too strong.;
Here are three things to avoid including in your skills section:
- Dont list the entire dictionary: While you really might have a long list of skills that are relevant to the position, be careful not to overwhelm recruiters and hiring managers with your list. Stick to your most important skills and the ones specifically noted in the job description. Otherwise, you might find yourself with a 5-page resume that will never even be read.;
- Dont brag: No one likes a bragger. Not in person, or in writing. Be careful to stick to the facts, and resist the urge to overembellish or even worse lie about your qualifications.
- But dont undersell yourself, either: Being too humble can actually hurt you when applying for jobs. They dont know what your experience is if you dont share facts about your achievements and knowledge with them! Dont be afraid to let the hiring manager know that you are the right candidate for the role.
Don’t Miss: How To Create A Resume On Iphone
What Is Your Personal Brand
Personal branding is how you distinctively market your uniqueness.Bernard Kelvin Clive
Today, the job market is very competitive and tough. Having a great CV will only let you go so far because everyone has a CV, but no one else has your distinct personal brand! It is your personal brand that differentiates you from everyone else and that is what people buyyou.
Your personal brand is your mark on the world. It is how people you interact with and the world see you. It is your legacyit is more important than a business brand because your personal brand lasts forever.
I have coached people who have very successful careers, and they come to me because they have suddenly found that they are not getting the opportunities or having the conversations that would them to their next role. They are having what I call a career meltdown, all because they have no personal brand.
A personal brand helps you become conscious of your differences and your uniqueness. It allows you to position yourself in a way that makes you stand out from the pack, especially among other potential job applicants.
Dont get me wrong, having a great CV and a is important. However, there are a few steps that you have to take to have a CV and LinkedIn profile that is aligned to who you are, the value you offer to the market, and the personal guarantee that you deliver results.
In Your Experience Section
The other place you should highlight your soft skills is in the experience section of your resume.
This is ideal for showing off your soft skills, because experience bullet points allow you to go into detail about how your soft skills helped you achieve things at work and deliver results.
For instance, heres a resume work experience section that highlights soft skills throughout:
- Oversee a team managing daily restaurant operations, focusing on seamless service delivery and customer satisfaction
- Analyze operational issues and develop plans of action to improve performance, services, and safety
- Streamline workflow procedures and minimize labor costs through effective staff scheduling and delegation
- Develop and maintain friendly relationships with customers, leading to an increase in regulars
- Train staff to deliver high-level customer service, resulting in a 20% increase in sales
Note that within five short bullet points, this candidate is able to highlight a variety of soft skills, including leadership, organizational skills, interpersonal skills, and problem-solving.
Read Also: How To Build A Acting Resume With No Experience
Examples Of Hard Skills
Hard skills Examples for Software Engineering
- Computer Programming and Debugging
Hard Skills Examples for Marketing
- Google Analytics
Hard Skills Examples for Project Management
- Project management software
- Microsoft Office
- Project management frameworks and methodologies
- Programming languages and frameworks
Hard Skills Examples for Education Services
- Audio visual presentation skills
- Preparing and executing remedial programs
- Planning and preparing lessons
- Electronic Performance Evaluation
Hard Skills Vs Soft Skills
Hard skills refer to the technical knowledge or training you have gotten through experience. They are specific and essential to each job and are used for completing your tasks.
Hard Skills Include :
- Machinery skills – operating a road roller, operating a PoS, pallet-stacker, forklift, etc.
- Software skills – Adobe Creative Suite, Ableton Live Suite
- Tools – SEM Marketing, Stethoscope, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, ERP systems, CRMs
- Languages – French, Spanish;
- Coding Languages – Python, C++, C#, Java, Scala, R
- Techniques – Frequency analysis, Crystallization;
- Accounting & bookkeeping
- And just about any task-specific skill
Soft skills, on the other hand, are attributes and habits that describe how you work individually or with others. They are not specific to a job, but indirectly help you adapt to the work environment and company culture.;
Some of the most in-demand soft skills are:
- Effective communication
The main differences between hard skills and soft skills are:
How you obtain them
- Hard skills are obtained through work experience, education, training, and certification.;
- Soft skills, on the other hand, can be gained through life experience, both on and off work.
How you use them – you apply hard skills directly into the job; whereas soft skills come into play indirectly.
Read Also: What Does A College Resume Look Like