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hard skills

What Soft Skills Are Most Important on Your Resume?

According to a LinkedIn survey, 80% of employers struggle to find employees with soft skills. The most important skills they look for are creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and time management.

Hard Skills Vs. Soft Skills

You might think that a career path in IT or other tech-heavy industries would emphasize hard skills (coding, technical knowledge, lab skills). However, a survey from BestColleges found that only 11% of employees report using hard skills most of the time; 20% report using trade-specific skills (how to operate a machine or tool) most of the time; and a whopping 41% use soft skills, including communication and creative problem-solving.

If you want a higher-paying job, honing your soft skills, showing leadership, and demonstrating your ability to manage projects and people are as important as hard skills—and rapidly becoming more important. People who can analyze data, apply the results, and make decisions are in demand and more protected from automation than those with hard skills only in almost every career category. In addition, your ability to learn and your flexibility in taking assignments will enable you to acquire the soft skills experience you need.

Soft Skills on Your Resume

In this atmosphere, your resume and LinkedIn profile must refer to soft skills. You should mention key soft skills listed in the job posting or advertisement, but you should put those words in context by describing when you:

  • Were confronted with a problem and solved it
  • Demonstrated team leadership, collaboration, or participation
  • Resolved or prevented a customer problem
  • Received recognition from peers, management, vendors, or customers for your work or attitude
  • Took the initiative, turned around a project or team, or came up with an idea adopted by the team or company
  • Spoke in public or wrote a report.

Your examples may be drawn from relevant experiences on the job, while volunteering, or during your education. You should also practice your interview skills to sound fluent and confident, demonstrating communicating skills right then.

If you need help creating a resume or LinkedIn profile that does justice to your soft skills, contact Robin’s Resumes® today. We make sure your resume shows you possess the skills that hiring managers and recruiters want most.

Defining Some Resume Terms

Often in these blogs I speak about achievement, hard skills, soft skills, knowledge, and experience. Here briefly are definitions of those terms with examples:

  • Achievements describe what you accomplished by applying your skills, education, and experiences—for example, “Saved $250,000 annually by renegotiating vendor contracts.”
  • Hard skills are those you accumulate through education and experience, such as the ability to code software, speak Italian, build a house, or audit finances. The best way to demonstrate hard skills is to incorporate them in an achievement. They can also be listed briefly at the top or bottom of the resume (language fluency or financial skills are often handled this way), depending on their importance to the job.
  • Soft skills include leadership, teamwork, and the ability to handle difficult situations (for example, difficult customers)—anything that reflects on who you are as a person. These are best shown as part of achievements: “Led team of technical writers and designers in developing user manuals.” If you simply state that you are a great leader, the hiring manager or recruiter has no incentive to believe you. You must demonstrate through an achievement that you practiced your leadership ability and that your leadership had an effect on the company.
  • Knowledge includes education, both college degrees and continuing education through workshops, seminars, post-graduate courses, and so on. (High school education is generally not mentioned unless you are applying for your first job as a teenager.) You should mention if you are working toward a degree or if you fulfilled some of the requirements toward a degree.
  • Experience includes board memberships, volunteer work, participation in professional organizations, publications, and relevant hobbies (for example, membership in a softball team when you are applying to sell sports equipment).

Your resume should highlight achievements, hard and soft skills, education, and experience because they are unique to you and make you stand out from the competition. Whether you call it “branding” or a “unique value proposition” or any other name, what employers want to know is why they should hire you and not the other guy.

Having trouble identifying and writing about the achievements, skills, knowledge, and experiences that make you a valuable employee? Contact Robin’s Resumes® for the help you need.

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