CV Communication Skills Examples, Guide & Tips

Understanding Communication Skills (With Examples)

Communication skills simply refer to your ability to communicate with other people in a work setting. This could mean everyday communication with your colleagues, communication with managers or senior employees, or communication with partners, customers, clients or prospective clients. Your ability to communicate with all these groups of people will go a long way to determining success in your job applications, and in your wider career.

With the world of work constantly growing in complexity, and companies facing ever greater pressure from competition, economic conditions and evolving technologies, it’s more essential than ever to have a well-functioning team. If your team cannot operate effectively, you’re already fighting a losing battle. Strong communication skills are one of the key features of successful teams.

There are various communication skills that are essential to master if you want to enhance your job prospects and thrive in the workplace. Here are a few examples of communication skills for your CV:

Verbal communication

Verbal communication is how well you communicate through speech. This is a broad skill set with many elements, including clarity of speech, self-confidence, vocabulary, verbal reasoning and the ability to construct a well-considered viewpoint or a convincing statement under pressure. Strong verbal communication is not just about your ability to get on well with fellow team members, but includes conversing with senior figures, networking and communicating with clients, or prospective clients.

Presentation skills

Presentation skills involve communicating to an audience, often with the use of visual prompts such as PowerPoint slides or handouts. Presentations can either be scripted or loosely structured. You might deliver presentations to clients, to pitch for new work or to deliver the results of projects. To senior figures, presentations may discuss finances or review projects. You might also present to partners or industry peers, at conferences or other industry events.

Writing skills

Written skills can help you to craft effective emails, write professional letters, produce compelling reports or create engaging, persuasive content aimed at customers. Whether you specialise in long-form writing or short, snappy content for social media or marketing campaigns, mastery of written content is always a useful asset for your career. 

Telephone manner

If you’re applying for a role where you’re likely to be answering calls, placing calls or talking on the phone for a significant amount of time, a professional telephone manner is essential. Elements of a strong telephone manner include a polite, professional tone and the ability to communicate clearly, without the benefit of non-verbal cues.

Interpersonal skills

Your interpersonal skills reflect your ability to build strong, trusting relationships with colleagues and clients. This typically means combining strong verbal skills with the ability to build rapport, empathise with others and gain trust, whether from fellow team members, or people you meet on behalf of your employer.

Listening skills

One of the keys to being a strong communicator is being able to listen effectively, understand the perspectives of others and make people feel included, valued and appreciated. Active listening techniques are highly valuable in various workplace situations, and can contribute significantly to team harmony.

Hard and Soft Communication Skills

Communication skills can be either a hard or soft skill. While it might be tempting to think of communication skills as purely a soft, transferable skill, you can also reference communication in various hard, technical and computer skills on your CV. If the role requires good communication skills, try to add a combination of both soft and hard communication skills throughout your CV.

Some soft communication skills include:

Hard communication skills can include:

Identifying the Communication Skills Needed in an Application

While most roles will require a certain level of communication skills, for a successful application you’ll need to tailor the communication skills in your CV to match the job description. There are two stages to identifying the communication skills needed to give your application the best chance of success. These are:

Review the job description for keywords

Your first task is to review the job description and identify any keywords and phrases related to communication. Consider how important communication skills are to the job overall. Are they listed under ‘essential skills’? You could make your keyword analysis more effective by using an AI assistant, such as ChatGPT, to review the job description and identify the most valuable keywords.

Assess your own communication skills

Once you’ve identified the most critical communication skills listed in the job description, you’ll want to compare these to your own skills, to assess which to mention in your CV and how much emphasis to place on each. Think about your competence in each of the communication skills, and examples of when you’ve used them in your career to date. You’ll want to place the greatest emphasis in your CV on the communication skills that have made the biggest impact, and that you can provide evidence for.

How to Highlight Communication Skills in Your CV

You can reference communication skills in various ways throughout your CV. The amount of emphasis you place on communication skills in your CV will depend on how prominent they are in the job description. If a job listing calls for outstanding communication skills, you’ll want to make sure every part of your CV helps to convince the employer that you’re a strong communicator. Here are some tips for mentioning communication skills in different parts of your CV:

CV summary

If communication is among your strongest personal skills, you’ll want to reference it in your CV summary. This places these skills at the forefront of the reader’s mind and shows employers that communication skills are one of your best qualities.

Work experience

Use your work experience section to show employers how you’ve used communication skills in previous roles, and the impact they had. Use strong action verbs related to communication skills, such as ‘presented’, ‘collaborated’, ‘liaised’ and ‘communicated’.

Skills section

You can include communication skills in your CV skills list. Whether you separate out hard, technical skills and soft, transferable skills, or create a single skills list, make sure your skills list includes references to the most essential communication skills from the job description.

Other sections

If you’re struggling to prove your communication skills through your work experience, you could use voluntary work or hobbies and interests to prove them. If you have good examples of how you’ve used communication skills in either of these settings, use a CV format that includes either or both of these sections.

"For a successful application you’ll need to tailor the communication skills in your CV to match the job description."

Key takeaways for adding communication skills to your CV

Communication skills can be valuable to almost any CV. Review the job description and identify the key communication skills for the role, then consider how best to reference these skills throughout your CV. Your CV presentation can really showcase your communication skills, including your ability to communicate in writing. Use CVwizard’s CV maker to create a CV that stands out from the competition. Sign up today and choose from CV examples that fit your personal style, and the role you’re applying for.