Employers are interested in knowing the skills that you have. This helps them to know you a little bit better regarding certain aspects. Now we are going to go over the types of skills they want to know about you. Sometimes, we tend to only include our technical expertise or the knowledge we have, those are the hard skills, we also need to remember to include the interpersonal qualities we have, those are the soft skills. They might be different, but they complement each other.
Soft skills
The soft skills are related to personal traits and habits. This type of skills can be improved over time and practice, they can also be acquired in formal training or self-training, as well in classes. According to a survey, these are some of the most relevant soft skills that business executives
- Problem-solving
- Effective communication
- Self-direction
- Drive
- Adaptability/flexibility
- Teamwork
- Conflict resolution
- Research
- Creativity
- Work ethic
- Integrity
Each one of these skills have also related skills, that might fit you even better and describe what you are able to do in a detailed way. For example, if you are very good at communicating you could go into detail with the related skills; confidence, writing, empathy, active listening, public speaking. Although, these are some of the skills hiring managers might look the most, for certain types of job descriptions they might be looking to some different ones, review them, and rethink, if you have them don´t forget to include them. It is important to keep our resumes update and evaluate which skills we possess.
There is a large diversity of soft skills if you find that some of these don´t fit you can also search for a larger list of them and find out the ones you own. Here are others just to mention:
- Critical and structured thinking
- Negotiating
- Self-management
- Time management
- Conflict management
- Cultural awareness
- Common knowledge
- Responsibility
- Etiquette and good manners
- Courtesy
- Self-esteem
- Sociability
- Integrity
- Honestly
- Empathy
- Project management
- Business management
Another difference between soft and hard skills is that soft skills can go across different career paths or fields but hard skills in most scenarios won´t.
Hard Skills
Hard skills as we mentioned earlier are technical expertise or the knowledge you have to obtain through your education or work experience. You will find in some of the job descriptions that there are particular technical or knowledge skills they may require from candidates for certain types of industries or careers. Keep in count those types of skills if you have not listed them on your resume please do, you might be missing some opportunities for not including those. Here is a few hard skills lists it:
- Data analysis
- Design
- Marketing
- Web development
- Bilingual
Here it happens the same, each one of these hard skills can be related to other skills that even more specific on what you can do, for example, you could include marketing as a skill but you could go beyond and also include that you are able to do SEO, SEM, CMS, Google Analytics, among other process or tools that you know how to manage. Being more specific allows recruiters, hiring managers, the human resource team to get to know you even better.
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Sources:
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/resumes-cover-letters/soft-skills
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/resumes-cover-letters/hard-skills-vs-soft-skills
https://resumegenius.com/blog/resume-help/hard-skills
Schulz, B. (2008). The importance of soft skills: Education beyond academic knowledge. Nawa Journal of Communication, 2(1), 146-154. http://ir.nust.na/handle/10628/39