Are You Including These Skills in Your Resume?

The job market in 2018 is highly competitive because there are plenty of job openings, companies are hiring and the economy is adding jobs. Applicants must keep up with the latest trends in hiring to understand what job skills companies are seeking in candidates. Discover what skills you need on your resume and how to show them on this vital document.

What Employers Want

Your skills are the summation of your past experiences, learning opportunities, years on the job and how you navigated through your professional life up to this point. Your resume should show how you deal with time management, flexibility, social skills, ambition and critical thinking to increase the chances of receiving more job offers. Along with putting your skills on a resume, make your format easy to read so a hiring manager can find your top-level skills quickly and easily.

Soft Skills

Soft skills are ones you need no matter what kind of job you have in any type of company. These skills are also called transferable skills since you need them regardless of the industry. They're not easily defined because there's no certificate, diploma or piece of paper that says you completed a course in time management, drive or teamwork. List soft skills on your resume and what experiences you had that led to you obtaining these skills. For example, you might say you learned persuasiveness during your time on the sales floor at the Acme Brick showroom for one year.

Hard Skills

Hard skills are simpler to define based on the technical prowess, timeframe or certification you had to earn. If you have a diploma that says you finished a six-month training course on how to repair a particular MRI machine, your prospective employer can research that certification to see what you had to do to earn it. The same is true of two-year college degrees, four-year universities, continuing education and online classes from accredited institutions. Companies sponsor training, workshops and leadership courses that also denote hard skills. You can prove you have these hard skills by listing facts, completing a project, showing a transcript or having a sample of your work in a portfolio.

How to Display Job Skills on Your Resume

Create a Career Summary section at the top of your resume that highlights your most important and top-level skills so they stand out to a hiring manager or recruiter. List a skill underneath a position in your Experience section and highlight the text of that skill in bold so it draws the eye of the reader. A hiring manager calls you back for more information when he believes your skills match the job posting. That's why your skills need to stand apart in a resume you submit for consideration.

A resume serves as a peek inside your personal brand, and companies value particular skills over others. Some firms may even hire a highly skilled person versus someone who has a lot of education. How do you make your skills stand out on your resume? Give some ideas in the comment section below.

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