Wednesday, March 27, 2024
HomeEditor PicksWhat Kind Of Skills Do You Put On A Resume

What Kind Of Skills Do You Put On A Resume

Figure Out The Skills Needed For The Job

What Skills to Put On a Resume? Learn this trick to increase your chances

When applying for jobs, it is important to identify the set of skills that are needed. Picking out the needed skills will help you determine if you are a good fit for the role. It will also help you tailor your resume skills to the specific job you are applying for.

There are two main ways to determine the skills needed for a job.

The first is to dissect job descriptions and job postings that are posted on career websites and job boards. To do this, go through a job description and highlight each quality that describes the candidate the company is looking for.

For example, here is a job posting for a cashier position:

Then create a list of all the qualities described, making sure to write each skill using the same wording that is used in the job posting.

Problem Solving
Initiative Ownership

The second way to figure out what skills are needed for a job is to search for people on LinkedIn who are already performing the role.

Education Resume Summary Examples

  • Self-motivated university graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Secondary Education and critical experience in learning technology.
  • Compassionate and organized Caregiver with 3+ years of experience in providing expert care to both English and Spanish-speaking children aged 0-5. Experienced in working with special needs children and maintaining their emotional comfort and safety.
  • Imaginative, patient Special Education Teacher with 3+ years of experience focusing on meeting IEP goal requirements for students with special educational, behavioral and mental health needs.
  • Dedicated Tutor with 3+ years of experience improving student grades by focusing on total comprehension with targeted lessons in a variety of subject areas. Quickly identifies individual student learning styles to tailor exercises to their needs.
  • Motivated Teaching Assistant with 3+ years of experience promoting collaboration with the lead teacher to support student educational needs.
  • Conscientious Counselor with 3+ years of experience staying attentive to the needs of children, students, and parents, while ensuring a welcoming, trusting environment. Enjoys creating customized plans and programs to spur educational and emotional growth.

Consider Whether Or Not To Use Side Columns

Dr. Dawn D. Boyer of Dboyer Consulting advises againstusing templates with text blocks, double-line spacing, side columns, and othercreative but problematic layouts.

She continues, An ATS takes the text it finds and parses it over intodata blocks for future searches. Resumes with text boxes, fancy graphics,tables, and weird columns may confuse the ATS system, which can lead it to mixup the text, or ignore it totally.

According to her, its also the reason why putting yourinformation only in the header or footer is a bad idea. ATS often cantrecognize text embedded in headers, so your contact details wont be includedon your application.

Read Also: How To Build A Acting Resume With No Experience

How To Write A Skills Section For Your Resume

Although, at a first glance the skills resume section might seem straightforward. Once you start getting into the nitty-gritty of it, you will soon realize that you have a pile of practical questions that will require some research both about you and the job at hand.

A good way to start preparing for writing the skill section of your resume is by researching the job listing, the company and its work culture and asking yourself these 4 questions:

  • What are the skills needed for this job?
  • Do my skills align with the job?
  • Am I proficient in such skills?
  • Is it essential to add these skills on my resume?

Once youve answered these questions, you can begin adding the skills that meet your requirements.

How to format skills on a resume?

Formatting your skills on your resume will depend on a few factors such as, your choice of resume template and resume style. With the style of resume bearing the most weight will it be a chronological, functional, or a combined resume?

As for your resume template, you have more freedom and can pick from a variety of templates that meet your needs. However, not all resume templates are created equal and some are more suitable than others depending on the occupation.

If youre having a hard time deciding what kind of resume template to use, go through resume examples to gauge what kind of templates are typically used for certain jobs.

Hard Skills Vs Soft Skills: Whats The Difference

100+ Skills for Your Resume [&  How to Include Them]

Hard skills are your quantifiable abilities. These are skills that can be acquired through formal learning, seminars, certification programs, specialized courses, apprenticeships and in-house training.

If you were applying for a job as a Legal Assistant, you should have the following hard skills:

  • Legal Transcription
  • Dedicated

You May Like: Include Coursework On Resume

Top 50+ Skills Hiring Managers Look For On Resumes

A lot of research has been done as to what hiring managers look for on a resume. Many of the skills they seek are job-specific, while others are transferable.

To increase your chances of getting called in for an interview, include these top skills throughout your resume.

These professional skills are divided by category to help you find the skills that are relevant to you.

Tailor Your Skills To The Job

Relevance is key. Only list skills that are appropriate for the job you are applying for. You can figure out which ones are relevant by scanning a job listing.

Job ads usually list a set of requirements or skills they expect a good candidate to have. Make sure you dont leave any of those out on your resume.

For example, imagine you are applying for a line cook position in a restaurant:

Heres the job description. We have underlined your main responsibilities:

Here at ABCD we are committed to creating a one-of-a-kind experience for our guests. Our French restaurant is looking for a professional line cook for the summer season to work directly under the supervision of our chef. Responsibilities include prepping and cleaning food, creating and cooking meals and cleaning up the working area. Impeccable attention to detail in food cooking and presentation is needed.

So from this, you understand that ABCD is looking for someone that:

  • Is committed to excellence and is highly professional
  • Works well under supervision, and with others
  • Can prep, clean, and cook food
  • Has great attention to detail in cooking and presentation

So, what you should mention in your skill section are:

Skills: food prepping, cooking skills, food presentation, attention to detail, heavy lifting, team-work.

Don’t Miss: Word 2016 Horizontal Line

My Employability Skills Exercise

Employers want you to have all of the seven employability skills, but you’ll find that you are better at some of the skills than others. The skills you are good at can give you career ideas.

Try this exercise

2. Review this worksheet. Which skills have more examples? Which skills are your strongest?

3. Use our Skill Matcher tool. Put your strongest skills into this.

4. Our Skill Matcher tool will suggest career ideas based on your strongest skills.

How To Choose The Right Balance Of Skills

Writing Your Resume Skills Section: Do’s and Don’ts

Now that you understand what kinds of skills are important and the difference between technical and soft skills, its time to look at how you can incorporate them into your CV. You cant list every single skill that you have, so you will have to be strategic in selecting the most suitable ones for the role you are applying for.

The best way to approach this is to underline or highlight all the skills that the recruiter has specifically mentioned in the job spec. Lets say, by way of example, that you were looking for a Marketing Manager role and you came across a job description that outlines the following duties and responsibilities:

  • Manage and implement digital marketing campaigns
  • Oversee the social media strategy
  • Lead a team of in-house and freelance team members
  • Manage and maintain the companys CMS
  • Maintain search engine optimisation strategies for the companys website
  • Work in partnership with experts and agencies
  • Organise and attend company events
  • Act as the main point of contact for marketing
  • Manage the CRM system

Lets now a little closer at the types of skills that the recruiter is looking for:

Read Also: How To Make An Acting Resume With Little Experience

Add Your Professional Skills In The Experience Section

The next step is to blend your professional skills into your resume experience section.

How?

Use the resume keywords you found in the job ad and include it the job description. Try to not paraphrase them too muchATSs are smart, but not smart enough .

But remember

Your goal is not just to get through the ATS scan, but to wow the recruiter with your achievements. Thats why you must justify your skills with numbers.

Learn this simple equation by heart:

Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean:

  • Delivered exceptional customer experience by displaying a customer first attitude. Consistently scored 90% and above in customer satisfaction surveys.
  • Made personal connections with 50+ customers to help them with specialized financial needs and partnered with the branch team to better identify cross-sale opportunities. Over 80% of referred prospects converted into clients.
  • Gained expert knowledge of 20+ banking products and solutions in the first 3 months.
  • Educated 50+ customers about the banks technological solutions, e.g. online banking apps for stock exchange tracking and trading, and VIOP transactions. 70% became regular users

Why Listing The Essential Skills And Abilities For Resume Are Important

What are the most important skills and abilities for resume? Which set of skills will get you the job? Do you know what the difference between hard skills and soft skills is? How will you able to share your skills, accomplishments and expertise with your prospective employers? The perfect place to highlight your strengths and abilities is your resume, along with your experience history.

These skills can be used by you throughout the process of searching for a job. First of all, you can use these skills and abilities for a resume.

Secondly, these skills and abilities can also be used in your cover letter. They can be mentioned in the body of your letter. Be time specific about your skills and elaborate when you demonstrated them at work.

Obviously every job has a specific requirement criteria of the skills and abilities for a resume, so you need to make sure that you go through the job descriptions thoroughly. Focus on the list of skills emphasized on by the employer.

In order to gain attention, highlight the skills and abilities in your resume while describing your previous positions. If possible, then do so in a separate section of skills and abilities for a resume.

You May Like: Ms Office 2007 Resume Templates

Tailor Your Skills To The Company/position

As you may have read in our other blog articles, it is always very important to tailor your job interview to the company and position you are interviewing with/for (for a more in depth look at our Tailoring Method article. This includes your resume and the skills you include on your resume as well!

As we mentioned before, the company will have a specific set of skills that they will require the successful candidate to have in order to do the job to their standard.

So as you might have guessed, it is absolutely essential that these skills make an appearance on your resume.

You need to spend some more time researching the company, and this means going through all of their various web properties including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Why?

Because they will leave clues about the types of people they hire, which will give you a better idea of the skills that you need to include in your resume. This especially applies to soft skills.

Ask yourself this. Do I have a similar skill-set to the types of employees they hire?

If the answer is yes, great!

If the answer is no read on!

And as we said before, REALLY dig into the job description to make sure you have a strong understanding of the skills that are required for the job, and make darn sure you put those skills in the skill section of your resume.

How To Effectively List Professional Skills On Your Resume

Things That Make You Love And Hate What Kind Of Skills To ...

Bar tending, Writing, Python, Bookkeeping, Crocheting, whatdo these things have in common?

These are a list of skills, not all of which are worth listing inyour resume.

Employers call applicants for an interview only when their resume matches the specific professional skill set they need. Padding your resume with a list of skills, as impressive as it looks, wont help your application if those skills arent related to the job.

In this article, I explain the different types of professional skills that are relevant, and how to select which of those skills to include in your resume skills section. I also cover how to list skills on a resume so it stands out and fits the job your applying to best.

Listing the right professional skills on your resume is important, lets begin by looking at why that is:

Don’t Miss: How To Update Your Resume On Linkedin

Ability To Gather And Process Information Efficiently

Being a new employee, you will be expected to learn the job in a timely manner and understand the requirements of your new position within the company. In most cases you will be pared with someone who will teach you what you need to know, but if you cannot learn and adapt quickly, you become a liability. You must show that you have the initiative to perform tasks and do your job effectively.

Weave Your Skills Into Your Professional Experience Section

While many job seekers may list skills in a separate section of their resume, its also important to weave them into descriptions under each of your previous positions. This is where you have an opportunity to strengthen your skills section with additional context and specific examples.

For example, if you include the skills project management and time management, you could illustrate this by providing a real-life example, such as: Successfully managed six projects across three separate teams during the first half of 2018, and delivered all completed items by the deadlines.

Don’t Miss: Where To Put Relevant Coursework On A Resume

What Are Skills Why Are Skills Important

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a skill is:

the ability to use ones knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance

a learned power of doing something competently: a developed aptitude or ability

When it comes to job hunting, your skills are what set you apart. Every human on earth has a set of skills that is unique to them. Likewise, every professional position has a unique set of skills that is required for performing the job.

Finding the perfect alignment between these two ideas is the key goal for every hiring manager.

If a hiring manager finds someone that already possesses the skills needed for their job, they wont have to spend so much time and money on training. It also means that their new employee will be able to pull their own weight more quickly, providing a quicker return on their hiring investment.

But how do hiring managers know who has what it takes to perform well on the job?

The first and most important place hiring managers look is at your resume. On average, a hiring manager spends 6 seconds reviewing a resume and during that time they are scanning the pages to see if the skills required for the job jump out at them.

If they find what they are looking for, you get called in for an interview. If they dont quickly see what they are looking for, your resume will most likely be discarded.

As a job seeker, it is your responsibility to make sure you know what skills hiring managers are looking for.

Why Should You Write About Personal Qualities For A Job

How to Write a Skill-Based Resume

Its simple. You increase your chances of success. For example, if you cannot handle people that dont have a sense of humor, you wont be able to work productively with them. If you consider a window of 10-minutes being late and not that big of a deal, then a punctual person will just be irritated. Personal qualities are just as important as professional skills, but acquiring them is much more difficult because they are formed throughout ones life and under the influence of many different circumstances.

What is the difference between qualities and skills?

When a section on personal qualities in a resume is required by the employer, the applicant may write, for example: «I am attentive to details» or, «Im good at public speaking». But this is a mistake, because in this case the applicant is highlighting his or her professional skills.

Qualities are not the same as skills, instead they form skills.

For example, if you have perfectionism as a personal quality, you will naturally form the skill of attention to detail. And if you are an extrovert, its easier for you to develop the skill of public speaking. Moreover, a sociable person gains the skill of working in a team quicker than his introverted colleague.

Personal qualities are necessary for the quick and effective assimilation of professional skills.

Wrong:Right:

Good qualities for a resume

How to describe personal qualities on a resume? Below is a list of skills and qualities and examples of personal attributes.

You May Like: Relevant Coursework Resume

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.

Mine The Job Descriptions For Must

The next step is take a look at the job description for the position you are applying for and make a list of the required skills that are listed. Are any of the skills on both of the lists you just created? If so, these are must-haves for your resume.

Now notice if there are any skills on the job description that you dont have. If there arent any, great!

But if there aredont panic. You just need to dig a little deeper into your past in order to demonstrate that you have the skill more on that in a minute.

Here is a link to a ton of job descriptions that can give you an idea of the skills needed take a look and find the position you are interviewing for!

You May Like: How To Build A Acting Resume With No Experience

RELATED ARTICLES

Most Popular

When Does This Is Us Resume

Resume For Property Manager