Top Skills for Resumes: Stand Out to Employers with These Essential Abilities

Understanding hard skills vs. soft skills

Both hard and soft skills are vital to each job role, and understanding their differences helps you write a stronger resume. 

Here’s a quick summary of hard and soft skills:

• Hard skills: These abilities are taught, typically related to specific roles, and aren’t generally transferable. They’re often obtained through active practice, experience, and higher education. Examples include programming, graphic design, and data analysis.
• Soft skills: These capabilities are most usually natural and innate, although they can be taught through gradual practice and training courses. They help you get your work done, collaborate with others, and solve problems. Common examples include communication, time management, and teamwork.

While hard skills are traditionally more desirable, increasingly more employers are on the lookout for adaptable workers with keen soft skills. Hard skills help people complete their specific tasks well, but due to rapid role shifts and company restructures, soft skills like flexibility help employees react to change. 

Both types of skills are typically listed together on a resume. However, if you really want to draw attention to your separate hard and soft skills, it’s important to find a flexible resume template that allows you to build distinct headers.

5 in-demand soft skills to put on resumes

Let’s take a look at a list of skills for resumes. These are the most sought-after soft skills that hiring managers need to build collaborative, efficient teams.

For each point, we’ll provide realistic resume skills examples to show you these abilities in action.

1. Time management

Time management describes how well you manage your schedule and tasks. This is a broad skill that contains many smaller competencies, including prioritization, delegation, and organization.

For instance, an executive administrative assistant may prioritize scheduling in the morning to ensure their boss has an organized day of meetings ahead of them – the assistant can continue to do less time-sensitive tasks, like checking messages.

Another example is a project manager who needs to handle a last-minute client request for a blog post. The most suitable employee already has full capacity, so the manager delegates one of their tasks to another worker so they can write the high-priority piece.

2. Leadership

Leadership skills help people solve problems, make decisions, and encourage collaboration. These abilities help show hiring managers your confidence and growth potential.

An example of leadership is an HR manager who regularly discusses professional development with employees. Helping other people reach their goals and build stronger abilities are crucial management skills.

3. Communication

Communication is an umbrella term that refers to several subskills, including verbal, nonverbal, written, and interpersonal abilities. Great communication skills encourage positive working relationships and lead to more innovative ideas.

Nearly every professional needs excellent communication skills. For example, a salesperson must listen to prospect requirements and fully communicate their product’s value.

However, these capabilities show up in roles you may not expect. Even a more isolated position, like an IT specialist, must accurately describe computer issues to their manager and suggest a clear solution.

4. Teamwork

Teamwork skills allow multiple people to collaborate, agree on solutions, and work as one. It heavily relies on relationships and harmony, but it’s more than that – great teamwork involves complementing each other’s competencies with your own skill sets.

A great example is a web development team that strives to understand each other’s ideas before counter-arguing them. Then, once the project’s in motion, they also allow each other to do what they’re best at – Stacy is a keen back-end developer, so Ken focuses his attention on front-end work.

5. Adaptability

Adaptability is the ability to react to sudden change, flex to new ideas, and multitask. This skill has always been important, but it’s a must-have in the modern working world due to restructures, shifting roles and priorities, and unprecedented events.

For example, a company might discover that an AI tool is more efficient for managing job candidates, so its HR team must adapt to their new responsibilities, like running the software.

Check out our realistic resume samples for even more examples of soft skills for specific industries.

48 hard skills to list on resumes for different industries

Now, we’ll dive into technical skills. Because hard skills are often role-specific, we’ll be dividing them by industry for easy navigating.

IT

IT professionals need one eye on shifting trends to stay current with technology, including new programming languages, changes in AI processing, and software skills.

Here are the top hard skills for the IT industry:

Healthcare

Healthcare needs a balance of hard and soft skills. These professionals need people skills like empathy and patience, but must use keen technical skills to monitor vital signs and maintain hygienic standards.

Here are some essential hard skills for healthcare workers:

Marketing

Marketing professionals must monitor their company’s performance, research rival tactics, and keep their strategies competitive.

These are some of the most vital marketing skills to mention on your resume:

Retail and sales

Sales professionals need to understand people’s needs, know how their service solves an issue, and accurately describe products.

Here are a few of the top hard skills for retail and sales:

Customer service

Customer service professionals must build strong hard and soft skills. People skills like patience and active listening help them provide better service, but they require keen hard skills like data entry to ensure quick, accurate assistance.

These are some of the most crucial customer service skills:

Human resources

HR staff take care of employees, overseeing their wellbeing and mediating the relationship between people and company. Balancing soft skills like conflict resolution and hard skills like training and development is essential.

Here are the top human resources skills to put on a resume:

Tailoring your resume skills section to the job description

One of our number one tips for every job application is this: there aren’t objectively good skills to put on a resume – it varies from role to role. It’s best to analyze job descriptions, discover what employers need, and write your resume accordingly.

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to tailoring a resume for each open role:

1. Create a master list of your hard and soft skills. Consider all of your past roles and responsibilities and write down everything that comes to mind. Do this with your achievements, too – build a list of your most impactful accomplishments and which skills they used.
2. Read the job description thoroughly. Write down vital points the ad mentions, including skills, job title, responsibilities, and daily tasks. Take note of “nice-to-have” skills that match your abilities – for instance, the employer might prefer candidates who have diverse language skills, so your intermediate Spanish skills would make you an attractive hire.
3. Review your master list and find which skills of yours match up. Choose relevant achievements and consider how to describe their impact, such as using metrics and numbers.
4. Edit your resume to include these skills, add the achievements to your Work Experience section, and make sure your job title uses the same language as the post. For example, changing Sales Representative to Sales Professional.
5. Review your resume and make sure it doesn’t have irrelevant skills. While these abilities are important for other roles, they’re just taking up valuable space if this position doesn’t require them.

Best ways to present your skills on a resume

The Skills section is only the beginning – there are far more ways to present skills on a resume. 

Weave your skills throughout your resume. Start by adding a few key skills to your resume summary or objective. This is an excellent way to immediately grab the recruiter’s attention, so be sure to pick vital skills and quantified achievements to entice them to read further.

Here’s a quick example:

We also recommend implying your skills through a well-crafted Work Experience section. Describe your achievements to show hiring managers your abilities rather than simply telling them. Here’s an example for an HR resume:

Try to incorporate your skills in subtle ways throughout your entire application. For example, it’s a good idea to add a few achievements to your cover letter, too.

“While hard skills are traditionally more desirable, increasingly more employers are on the lookout for adaptable workers with keen soft skills.”

Highlighting transferable skills for career changes

Understanding the value of your hard and soft skills is crucial when building a strong career change resume. Many skills are applicable to multiple industries, and when you properly identify and showcase them, you can show hiring managers that you’re ready for a new field.

Soft skills are the most common transferable skills. Abilities like time management, emotional intelligence, and adaptability are used in countless industries, so they help professionals shift from one field to another. For example, an HR manager’s strong communication skills would help them describe company reports as a business analyst.

Hard skills aren’t always transferable, but many of them can be. Programming languages are used by many professions – a web developer could switch to software engineering and make great use of their Python skills. This is also true for software skills like Microsoft Excel and Google Docs and project management tools like Asana and Monday.com.

Resume skills mistakes to avoid

Let’s finish up with a summary of common resume mistakes. This provides you with a quick reference when building your resume, so keep it in your back pocket whenever you’re applying.

Here are the main pitfalls when listing skills on resumes:

• Listing too many skills: It’s important not to overload the recruiter, and providing too many skills will distract them from the rest of your resume. Choose five to 10 skills and focus on them, providing details and explaining them in depth.
• Using bland language: Don’t sell yourself short – use exciting action language to describe your skills and achievements. Start sentences with words like “Committed,” “Achieved,” and “Led” to make a powerful statement.
• Misrepresenting your expertise: Never lie on your resume and claim to have skills you don’t possess. Be honest when describing yourself, and rely on the abilities you have.
• Using the wrong word: Describe your skills with the right terminology – you might use “emotional intelligence” when you really mean “conflict resolution.” If you aren’t sure, research the term or ask a colleague.
• Only using the Skills section: Your entire application is a canvas for describing your abilities, so don’t rely entirely on the Skills section of resumes. Mention your capabilities throughout your application, including your summary, Work Experience section, and additional headers like Projects or Volunteer Work.

Choose the right skills and land that interview

Hard and soft skills make a professional who they are, helping sales professionals sell products and graphic designers create eye-catching art, so it’s crucial to showcase them effectively. Review your career history, consider your competencies, and show potential employers what you bring to the table.

Remember that skills fluctuate as you grow, so it’s important to review your resume and update it regularly to keep it relevant. CVwizard makes it easy to build a professional resume and keep it up-to-date with our intuitive resume maker. Simply log in any time you need to edit, make a few changes, and download a new resume that accurately reflects your new skills.

References:

(1) The Ladders, 2018: Eye-Tracking Study