The first thing that generally pops in a candidate’s mind while preparing or molding a resume is, ‘What skills to put on a resume?’ The skills definition is not the issue here, but which skills to add as per the given job description so that they catch the recruiter’s eye is what confuses the candidate.
More often than not, professionals fail to mention their skills based on the job requirements posted by recruiters. Though having the required qualification is good, the skills have more weightage in comparison. These skills allow the recruiters to understand where your expertise lies in performing the required tasks of the job profile. These skills can majorly be divided into four categories, namely, domain-general skills, domain-specific skills, soft skills, and hard skills.
This blog aims to help you come across the following:
Let’s discuss some of the soft skills for a resume that are necessary and can be added for most job profiles.
Soft Skills for a Resume
Before reading about the core technical and other skills to list on a resume for respective jobs, you will read about some of the most significant soft skills that are looked for by recruiters. This list of skills will help you build your resume and make your resume stand out. These soft skills, or the personal skills for a resume are skills you have acquired over the years without any particular work experience. The top 14 soft skills to put on a resume are listed below:
- Problem-solving
- Creativity
- Teamwork
- Public speaking
- Collaboration
- Interpersonal communication
- Decision-making
- Accounting
- Leadership
- Active listening
- Management
- Adaptability
- Empathy
- Customer service
One of the best things about these job skills is that they are universal and not associated with a particular job role or an industry. These skills are transferable, and they can continue to be a part of the resume irrespective of the job you apply for, the company you wish to get into, etc.
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About the Skills
These skills are especially for entry-level professionals who have little to no prior work experience while applying for a job. They are domain-general skills that you need to add to your resume for most professions. Generally, recruiters look for the following soft skills in the resume of freshers while hiring:
- Leadership
- Communication
- Teamwork
- Problem-solving
Yes. These soft skills are extremely important when it comes to building up your resume. Additionally, in 2024, there are some of more most in-demand soft skills as follows:
- Adaptability
- Persuasion
- Creativity
- Collaboration
- Emotional intelligence
However, they are not enough. To get hired by organizations, you, as a candidate, need to have a mixture of both soft skills and hard skills.
Now that we have discussed the soft skills in detail let’s learn about the hard skills or core skills that you must include in your resume on the basis of the domain you plan to get into.
Hard Skills for a Resume
Further, you will read about the key skills for a resume that can be added with respect to the job profiles and the industry that you apply for. Unlike soft skills, which can be carried forward, the list for these hard skills is specific to the profile that you work in. Let’s learn about the resume skills examples for some of the most sought-after professions.
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IT Skills
Following are some of the IT skills a resume should contain as most jobs demand them in 2024:
- Debugging
- Web Development
- Frontend and backend development
- Coding in JavaScript
- Skills in any programming language
- Machine Learning concepts
- Data structures
- Experience in open-source
- UI/UX
- Cloud management
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Technical and Engineering Skills
The engineering field has numerous subdomains or types, such as civil, mechanical, chemical, aeronautical, etc. All these engineering types have their specific set of required skills. However, there are some skills that are similar in all these subfields.
In the technical and engineering field, the following are the technical skills for a resume, and you can add these skills to your resume if you have them:
- MS Word, MS PowerPoint, MS Excel, and other Microsoft Office tools
- Testing
- Prototyping
- Budgeting
- Troubleshooting
- Design
- Social media
- Spreadsheets, such as MS Excel, OpenOffice, Google Sheets, etc., to use functions like macros, pivot tables, lookups, and more
- Graphical tools, including CorelDRAW, Photoshop, Acrobat, and Illustrator
- JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and WordPress
- Mathematics, arithmetics, algebra, statistics, and calculus
- Programming skills in languages such as XML, C, C++, C#, Java, SQL, Perl, PHP, HTML, Python, and Ruby
- Research, networking, source checking, and more
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In this domain, along with the skills mentioned above, you must also include some computer skills for a resume. These skills include the following:
- Email
- Web Development
- Google Drive
- Social media
- Databases
- Hardware skills
These skills provide practical knowledge and the ability to perform various tasks. They also help candidates accomplish complex tasks that require expert skills.
Administrative Skills
Some of the best skills to put on a resume when applying for an administrative job are as follows:
- Scheduling
- MS Office
- Salesforce
- Billing
- Shipping
- Data Entry
- QuickBooks
- Calendar management
Healthcare and Nursing Skills
The field of healthcare and nursing is vast and extensive compared to most career fields. Precision and patience are two skills that are only a plus point in other career fields, but in this domain, these skills are a must.
There are some specific skills that you must have based on the sub-domain you choose. However, irrespective of the sub-domain you wish to opt for, some skills are valid across all sub-fields in the medical industry. These skills include:
- Patient care
- Wound dressing
- Patient assessment
- Record-keeping
- Phlebotomy
- Monitoring blood pressure
- Hygiene assistance
- Taking note of vital signs
- Rehabilitation therapy
- Electronic medical record (EMR)
- Electronic heart record (EHR)
- Meditech
- MRI, X-ray, and CAT scans and their uses
- NIH Stroke Scale Assessment of a patient
To become a professional in the medical and healthcare industry, these are among the required skills for a resume to have.
Accounting and Financial Skills
Skills to put on a resume while applying for jobs in accounting and finance fields are as follows:
- Payroll
- Management of assets
- Automation
- Tax returns
- Account reconciliation
- Profit and loss
- Visual Basic
- Know your customer (KYC)
- Advanced MS Excel skills
- Accuracy
- Revenue recognition
- Cognos Analytics
- SQL
- Planning enterprise resources
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Marketing and Advertising Skills
Marketing has become one of the most popular career choices today. With new and upcoming startups emerging almost every day, it has become important for these companies to advertise themselves to make their presence known and generate leads. Even top MNCs also have started to advertise and market themselves to reach out and gain new customers. For marketing, a few skills to put on a resume are listed below:
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
- CMS tools
- SEM/SEO
- Typography
- Data visualization
- Graphic design
- CPC
- Email automation and marketing
- Print design
- Branding
- Photography
- Social media marketing
- A/B testing
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Sales, Customer Service, and Retail Skills
In fields such as sales, retail, customer services, etc., there are a few skills in common. The skills for adding to your resume to apply for a job in these fields are as follows:
- Referral marketing
- POS
- Lead qualification
- Knowledge of the product
- Increasing CLV
- CRM software, such as Zoho, Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.
- Contract negotiation
- Analysis of customer needs
- Reducing CAC
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Graphic Design Skills
In this field, you should be creative and have skills in some of the most popular graphic design tools. Listed below are some of the graphic design skills for a resume:
- CorelDRAW
- Sketching
- Photoshop
- Typography
- Illustrator
- CSS
- HTML
- Free hand
- Layout
- InDesign
- Acrobat
- Photo editing
- Digital printing
Let’s check out the tips and tricks to build a UI UX Designer Resume!
HR Skills
For a career in HR, you can mention the following skills in your resume:
- Onboarding
- Employee relations
- Managing performances
- Scheduling
- Managing projects
- Human resources information system (HRIS)
- Collaboration
- Teamwork
- Customer service skills
- Compensating employees
Management Skills
Following are a few of the management skills for a resume to have:
- Innovation
- Planning
- Tech-savvy
- Motivation
- Negotiation
- Strategic management
- Business development
- Task delegation
- Scrum
- Agile
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Now that we have read about the numerous skills that are necessary to include in the resume as per the career option you choose, let’s understand why a mixture of these is necessary rather than just having a single list.
Why list both hard skills and soft skills in a resume?
In any job profile that you apply for, recruiters look for both soft skills and hard skills. The reason HR managers and recruiters specifically look for both types of skills are listed below:
- If you mention only soft skills, then the recruiters will be forced to believe that you may have some interpersonal skills; however, you are not qualified for that particular job or any job in general.
- If you mention only hard skills in your resume, the recruiters may believe that you work like a robot, and you will not be able to function in a social, official environment.
After getting a gist of the numerous skills and understanding why it is necessary for you to add both types of skills to your resume, you might be wondering how to arrange these skills and prepare your resume while applying for a job.
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Steps to Arrange Skills for a Resume
When it comes to resume creation, the skills will not add value to it if you have not arranged them well and molded your resume in a presentable manner. To help you prepare your resume, we have listed a few steps that you can follow. Let’s start with the same.
Step 1: Ensure that your skills on the resume are relevant to the target job
Whenever you apply for a job, the first thing you need to keep in mind is that you must customize your skills in a way that matches the requirements of the recruiter. This, in turn, will allow the recruiter to learn that you are fit for the job. Moreover, your resume will be able to beat the bots that screen resumes for keywords.
Now that you know what you need to do, you must learn how to do it.
To tailor your resume as per the given job ad that you wish to apply for, you need to follow the below steps:
- Create a master list consisting of all your skills that may come in handy in any profession
- Jot down a list in a spreadsheet or offline with all your soft skills and hard skills
- While reading the job description you apply for, focus on their requirements
- Pay attention to phrases like ‘knowledge of,’ ‘proficiency in,’ etc. and make a note of the same
- Compare the skills on your master list with the requirements mentioned in the job description and add the matching ones to your resume
- If there are a few skills mentioned in the description that you have but failed to add to your master list, add those as well
- One of the most important things you need to keep in mind while creating your resume for any job is that you must be honest with it. Do not add skills that you do not possess because the recruiters will figure it out sooner or later
Step 2: Add a separate section for key skills
One of the main reasons why you should add your hard skills in a separate section is that this will allow the recruiters to check them out easily. While mentioning the skills, you need to be precise. You should divide your skills into two categories: Soft skills and hard skills, and you have to mention a maximum of 10 skills combined.
In a similar manner, you must also mention your qualifications in a separate section so that the recruiters will come to know that you have the required qualifications.
There are numerous ways in which you can arrange and format these skills in your resume. However, a bulleted list is among the simplest and most effective arrangement methods. In the list, you can add the skills that you have, which match the employer’s needs; plus, the other sections of your resume can showcase those skills.
Apart from adding these skills, you can mention your proficiency level in them, respectively. To add the proficiency level, you can use terms such as ‘basic,’ ‘intermediate,’ or ‘advanced.’ You can also use graphs, boxes, and other formats to describe your expertise level in various languages, skills, software, etc.
You might have numerous skills that correspond with the skills listed in a given job description, yet you cannot add them all. Adding too many skills to your resume can lead to recruiters assuming that you are faking your skills, or you are over-qualified and, hence, not fit for the job, and so on. Instead, you can list about 5–10 skills that include your soft skills, hard skills, software that you have experience in, etc. Besides, in a resume with about 10 skills, you should have at least 4–6 general ones.
Step 3: Add a section for professional experience
If you have prior work experience in any domain, you must include that in the professional experience section of your resume. This section allows recruiters to learn that not only do you have the necessary skills, but you have also put them to use in the real-life corporate world. Your practical experience counts much more than the skills you write down without providing any evidence of experience in them.
Step 4: Add a resume profile
At the beginning of your resume, you add a summary of a couple of lines consisting of your most significant skills with respect to the job profile. This is referred to as the resume profile. Further, you can use no more than four of your skills as headings and mention a few examples under them, illustrating these skills. This will give a short introduction to your knowledge, skills, and experience that you have further mentioned in detail later in the resume. This allows recruiters to understand why you are an ideal candidate for the job.
As per your career level, this profile can be a resume summary or a resume objective. Those looking for entry-level jobs can add a resume objective, and those candidates with prior work experience need to write a resume summary.
Top Skills Required for Highest-paying Jobs in 2024
Ensure that you add the most demanding skills that are required in the most sought-after career options today.
But, this does not mean that you will add skills even when you do not have them because that will be misleading, and the recruiters are bound to find it. What you can do here is add some of the most popular skills that you have expertise in, even when the job does not require it explicitly.
The top 10 in-demand hard skills of 2024 as per LinkedIn are listed below:
- Blockchain
- Cloud Computing
- Analytical Reasoning
- Artificial Intelligence
- UX Design
- Business Analysis
- Affiliate Marketing
- Sales
- Scientific Computing
- Video Production
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Building the Perfect Resume for Your Dream Job
This blog on ‘100+ Skills for a Resume to Land Your Dream Job in 2024’ is written to ensure that you learn how to create your resume based on the jobs that you apply for, the skills that you possess, and various other factors. This blog also discusses some of the challenges you may face while preparing your resume and the solutions to the same. To acquire the skills mentioned in the blog, enroll in Intellipaat’s courses, and land a lucrative job.
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