How to Write a Job-Winning Resume | Guide for All Job Seekers in 2023
Learn how to write a resume that will get you your dream job.
There are many skills you can choose to put on your resume, but how do you know which ones to include?
Firstly, it is good to pick skills that are found in the job description. This helps you tailor your resume to the needs of the employer.
However, some skills are so common for many jobs because of their importance t in the workplace. These are the best skills you can include on your resume:
Every successful relationship relies on good communication which is why it is such an important skill in the workplace. Whether you’re speaking with clients, fellow coworkers or business partners, how you communicate will help determine how well you will achieve your goals.
Good communication helps build clarity, resolve conflict, and share information effectively.
Examples of communication skills include:
Regardless of your profession, at some point or another, you will have to work with others. It would be impossible to do business otherwise. Therefore, how you interact and work with others is critical to being a successful employee.
Your interpersonal skills help determine how well you fit within an organization or industry. Additionally, interpersonal skills affect how productive and engaged you are as a worker.
Examples of interpersonal skills include:
Many employers want their employees to stay organized. They need to rely on your ability to keep track of your tasks and resources.
Good organization makes it easier to answer questions, find new information, and keep track of important assets. Without proper organizational skills, you are at risk of slowing your team and your company down.
Examples of organizational skills include:
Middle School Teacher Resume Example
Accountant Resume Example
There are many different roles to play within a company. Each one requires the ability to work with others to achieve mutual goals.
Employees love to see candidates who can show that they have exceptional teamwork skills because it means they can be integrated more easily into the company.
Examples of teamwork skills include:
Time management is the ability to organize your tasks effectively. It is very important to be able to have good time management skills, especially for any deadlines or time-bound projects, because it increases efficiency and reduces stress.
Examples of time management skills include:
Most industries increasingly rely on data-driven decision-making. This means that is likely your job will require you to be comfortable working with data.
Data analysis incorporates statistics and other quantitative metrics to investigate problems and determine solutions. With good data analysis skills, you can be sure to add important value to your job responsibilities.
Examples of data analysis skills include:
You can’t always rely on others or computers to solve your problems. Employers need employees they can trust to figure out solutions for themselves.
Good critical thinking and problem-solving skills save valuable time and energy. Additionally, they are needed to solve the inevitable challenges that occur in any profession.
Examples of critical thinking and problem-solving skills include:
In one way or another, a company provides a good or service to someone else, which means many jobs require some level of client relations. Whether you deal directly with customers or work alongside business partners to satisfy clients, you must be able to provide excellent customer service.
Customer service is about understanding, accommodating, and providing for the needs of your customers. When done correctly, your customers will keep coming back.
Examples of customer service skills include:
Empathy is the ability to feel what another person feels. Emotional intelligence acts on empathy and perception to effectively manage emotional situations. These are the crux of any healthy relationship.
Employees with high levels of empathy and emotional intelligence can be entrusted to behave accordingly under any circumstances. Additionally, they provide foundations to build up other skills such as problem-solving and communication.
Examples of empathy and emotional intelligence skills include:
Project management involves setting goals, creating schedules, allocating resources, and managing budgets to deliver projects on time, within scope, and within budget.
Effective project management is essential in the workplace because it helps organizations achieve their goals, improves productivity and efficiency, and ensures that projects are completed successfully.
Examples of project management skills include:
Our global economy is tied to digital technology, which means even a basic proficiency in computer skills is required for most professions.
Your ability to use a computer is necessary for task management, communication, and research. Good computer skills keep an organization efficient and relevant among competitors.
Examples of computer skills include:
The dynamics of the economy mean employees need to grow and keep learning if they want to stay relevant. Employers want to see that you can take your current qualifications and expand upon them further.
Such behavior adds value to you and your employer because you develop more agency and competency as a worker. This results in personal satisfaction and professional productivity.
Examples of learning and growth skills include:
Companies need to adapt to changes in their industry and the economy constantly. This means they need employees who can do the same.
Your ability to adapt and be flexible helps you remain efficient and effective regardless of your task. It makes you more valuable as an employee and opens up new opportunities of professional development.
Examples of adaptability and flexibility skills include:
Robust attention to detail is a proactive skill in the workplace. Not only do you ensure the quality of a good or service, you can catch errors and problems before they occur.
This skill is especially important in any work environment involving multiple people. Attention to detail helps ensure that the pipeline of productivity flows smoothly forward.
Examples of attention to detail include:
As powerful as computers have become, the human brain is still an excellent source of intuition and outside-of-the-box thinking.
Creativity drives innovation and problem-solving, so many employers want to hire creative individuals. Such skills can result in new effective approaches to projects and strategies.
Creativity skills include:
Take a look at the following examples to get a better idea of how you will want to include skills on your resume.
A software developer must provide specific hard skills related to their profession, as well as soft skills that show they can work effectively with others when writing their resume.
Professional Skills
A resume for a data analyst position should highlight a combination of technical expertise and problem-solving skills, among other important qualifications.
Professional Skills
A nursing resume can include a wide range of skills, depending on the specifics of the position.
Professional Skills
Any pharmaceutical resume must list industry-specific skills and important interpersonal abilities to showcase their comprehensive value.
Professional Skills
Commercial drivers, such as truck drivers, delivery drivers, and transportation drivers, all come with similar skill sets that should be underscored on their resumes.
Professional Skills
Writing a resume can be made a lot easier with a template. Our free and premium resume templates are just what you need to help you land your next job!
Be honest: If you lie about your skills, you will set yourself up for failure in the future. Either the reader will tell you are lying due to inconsistencies, or they will find out in the interview.
Be confident: Just because you must be honest doesn’t mean you don’t need to be humble. Celebrate your skills and promote any and all that you have to help you land the job.
Reflect and diversify: You may think that you don’t have the right skills or enough of them. Don’t sell yourself short too soon! You likely have more skills than you realize. Take the time to seriously think about your past experiences and what type of skills they required.
Use the same language as the job description: This will help make your resume ATS-friendly and readable.
Be concise: Don’t go overboard in the skills section. Save details for the work experience section, cover letter, or potential interview.
When you get ready to list your skills on your resume, you will want to carefully follow these steps to ensure you showcase your best qualifications.
Choose only relevant skills for the job.
The reader does not want to spend too much time figuring out whether or not they want to learn more about you. They should be able to skim your resume and immediately decide you deserve further attention.
Therefore, you do not want to clutter your resume with unnecessary information. This is especially important for the skills section. Only list skills that are relevant to the job.
By tailoring your resume to the job you are applying for, you provide a better reading experience.
Use language found in the job description.
Don’t just choose relevant skills. Make sure you use the same wording or phrasing as found in the job description. This helps you stand out to the reader.
More importantly, this helps you make your resume more ATS-friendly. This is because applicant tracking systems (ATS) scan your resume and specifically look for target keywords from the job description.
Include top skills in the resume profile.
Your top three skills should be the ones that align best with the required qualifications for the job. Give these skills a boost by including them in your resume profile so that the reader immediately sees that you are a worthy candidate.
Demonstrate skills in the work experience section.
Listing skills is one thing, but providing evidence boosts your credibility with the reader. Most recruiters and hiring managers want evidence of your skills in action.
Your work experience section is the best place to demonstrate:
Combined, these details increase your value as a potential candidate for the position.
Use bullets and be concise in the skills section.
To avoid clutter, list your skills as bullets. Use as little wording as possible without being too vague. Strive for brief phrases or sentences that quickly get the point across.
Tailor and categorize skills.
It can’t be said enough, but your skills section should reflect the requirements found in the job description.
Make it even easier for the reader and categorize these skills. Group together several related skills to provide a logical system of organization.
Professional skills can be divided into two categories:
Every job requires some combination of hard and soft skills, which means your resume must reflect this balance. However, when in doubt, it is better to prioritize hard skills over soft skills on your resume because they are easier to validate with your experience. Soft skills, while important, can only be inferred through your resume or cover letter.
For example, imagine you list “data analysis” as one of your skills. Under one of your previous jobs, you provide an example of using data analysis, such as “Prepared monthly data analysis reports for sales team to increase productivity which resulted in a 15% increase in sales over a 12-month period.”
(Remember: It is always preferable to showcase your skills through a quantifiable achievement that added value to your company.)
Under this example, you could also list “teamwork” as one of your skills. However, it is harder to prove to the reader.
The difference between hard skills and soft skills is that hard skills are specific and measurable technical abilities learned through education or training. In contrast, soft skills reflect personal traits and the ability to work effectively with others, developed through social interaction.
Specific, measurable abilities.
Learned via education or training.
Generally technical in nature.
Can be tested for proficiency.
Employers desire hard skills in candidates to perform specific job tasks.
Personal qualities.
Learned through experience and observation.
Interpersonal or social in nature.
Difficult to quantify or measure.
Employers desire soft skills in candidates to ensure a healthy, productive work environment.
The best hard skills for your resume will greatly depend on the type of job you apply to. However, there are some commonly sought hard skills that almost every applicant will want to consider on their resume:
Soft skills can be applied to almost any job, and there are several that can help make a stronger resume:
Employers want skills that add value to their organization, so consider how your skills make you a much needed asset.
You should put any relevant skills found in the job description on your resume. However, some general skills sought by many employers include:
Communication.
Interpersonal skills.
Organization.
Teamwork.
Time management.
Data analysis.
Critical thinking and problem-solving.
Customer service.
Empathy and emotional intelligence.
Project management.
Computer proficiency.
Learning and growth abilities.
Adaptability and flexibility.
Attention to detail.
Creativity
Use concise phrases or sentences to list your skills on your resume in bullet form. Make sure to list only relevant skills to the job. Tailor these skills with exact wording from the job description and categorize them into groups.
A job skill is any ability or trait that helps you accomplish tasks while at work. Job skills can range from extremely technical, such as computer programming, to broadly interpersonal, such as teamwork. The importance of a job skill varies with every job based on requirements and responsibilities.
Hard skills are specific, quantifiable, and usually technical, abilities that require training to accomplish certain tasks.
Soft skills are personal qualities that determine work behavior with yourself and others. They can be applied to multiple fields, are learned through experience, and are harder to measure.
Hard and soft skills are very important in the workplace because they help determine the success and productivity of employees.
Employers want skills that effectively and efficiently accomplish responsibilities. The types of skills vary for every employer, but the end result should always be the same, that is, they can trust their employees to get the job done successfully.
There are many ways you can learn new skills for your resume. You can:
Take online courses.
Enroll in continuing education programs.
Find volunteer opportunities that offer training.
Shadow other professionals.
Create projects on your own.
Ultimately, how you learn new skills for your resume depends on your persistence and interests.