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It’s quite normal for job seekers to focus on the work experience or career summary section of their resume; however, the skills section shouldn’t become an afterthought.

Hiring managers look at the skills section of a resume to determine one thing: Does this person have what it takes on a most basic level? If your resume doesn’t includes skills listed in the job posting or only lists those skills, you’re doing yourself a disservice and hurting your chances of getting a job that you want.

The five tips listed below provide significant detail on how you should go about addressing the skills section on your resume.

1) Include both hard and soft skills.

Hard skills are technical abilities, such as equipment calibration or programming ability, you learn through classroom instruction or on the job. Soft skills are ‘people skills,’ like teamworking ability, you learn mostly through experience. Unlike hard skills, soft skills are more difficult to quantify and more subjective. For instance, how do you consider someone to have good leadership abilities?

It’s important to include both types of skills on your resume: Public speaking ability can be just as important to a hiring manager and expertise with database programs.

2) Customize skills section to the job being sought.

It’s also important not to include every single one of your hard skills and soft skills; just the ones that are relevant to the job you are seeking. For instance, public speaking may be useful if the job requires you to give presentations, but it isn’t if the job involves mostly analytical work performed at a desk.

3) Include transferable and adaptive skills.

In addition to listing your skills that can be found in the job posting, it’s also good to include transferable soft skills, which might translate from one field to another, and adaptive soft skills, which relate to your work style. Transferable skills might include training, leadership or innovation abilities. Adaptive skills might include the ability to focus on details or work well with team members to achieve success.

When listing soft skills, it’s important to be able to back up your claims with specific examples. For instance, if you claim to have leadership ability, you should be ready to talk about a time you had success in a leadership role.

4) Rate your hard skills.

You shouldn’t make a hiring manager guess at your proficiency in various technical skills. Rating your skills is a good way to take the guesswork out of your resume and show you’re being open and honest.

For the most essential skills on your resume, rate each one as either ‘exposed to,’ ‘experienced with’ or ‘highly skilled’ or some version of those ratings. For instance, you could say you have been “exposed to C++ programming,” “experience with forklift operation” or are “highly skilled at translating between English and Spanish.”

5) Organize logically.

List the most job-specific skills you have at the top and the less-relevant ones toward the bottom of your skills section. It can also be helpful to organize skills into categories, especially if the job requires wearing a few different hats.

At Action Group Staffing, we regularly help job seekers tailor their resume and connect them with the best-fit opportunities for their career. If you’re currently looking for job seeking assistance, please contact us today.


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