The skills section of your resume might be the most important part because it can set you apart from the top candidates. Here’s how to add resume transferrable skills to your resume.
5 Tips For Your Resume
1. The types of skills to add
You need to include both hard and soft skills. Hard skills are the ones you’ve attained through education and work experience that might be specific to your particular industry. Soft skills, on the other hand, are more transferrable because they’re usually linked to your personal traits, emotional intelligence, or people skills. This includes communication, relationship building, time management, teamwork, conflict resolution, decision-making, and creativity. These are crucial skills because they can be transferred across industries and positions and ranks.
2. Where to put the skills
Skills are important—they’re what most employers look for first—so you’re a skills section should be front and center, but your resume should also be peppered with skills throughout. List important skills in your education and experience sections and even your cover letter.
3. How to list the skills
First you need to figure out which are the most important skills. This will probably depend on the job you’re applying for, which is why it’s so important to tailor your resume for each job supplication. List skills that you have that are listed as requirements in the job posting. The skills you include should align with those requirements so you seem like a perfect match for the role.
4. Make the skills relevant
Don’t include skills that are irrelevant to the position. Your ability to type ninety words a minute or your lifeguarding certification don’t matter if you’re applying for a job as a welder. If you’re changing fields or applying for a job you’re not completely qualified for, focus on the skills that are important no matter what industry you’re in—those transferrable skills.
5. Figure out what’s missing
Once you’re finished and you’re pretty confident that your transferrable skills line up with the requirements of the position, ask yourself if any of your most notable skills—like fluency in a foreign language—are missing from your resume or cover letter. If they are, find a way to weave them in, along with any other more universal skills that a good candidate needs to have and any keywords that hiring managers might be looking for. Think: organizational skills, the ability to multi-task, or the ability to manage your time.
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