Showcase you! Top skills to put on a resume and 4 ways to share (with real examples)

Get that job. Communicate your worth with clarity and ease on your CVs, as well as LinkedIn and Portfolios. Even job interviews. Explore where – and how – to demonstrate your job skills and soft skills, in ways that fit your personality and impress employers and clients. Plus, loads of resume skill examples.

Showing achievements is easy. Demonstrating skills can be a challenge.

But here’s the problem.

Businesses and startups are evolving so fast, which means that many skills are becoming outdated. Companies and especially, startup jobs demand future-ready skills. Job descriptions are more skills-focused now, and business leaders and talent teams are carefully assessing for very specific work and interpersonal skills. 

So unless you can showcase your capabilities effectively, landing that opportunity can be hard.

When you’re job hunting, make every word count in your submissions.

Why, you ask. 

Simply because, resumes are getting shorter; cover letter emails are expected to be brief; and resume videos are only a minute (or two) long.

In other words, you have very little time to make a sizable impact.

The key question – what are the top skills to put on a resume, cover letters, outreach emails or your LinkedIn Profile…?

Explore the 3 top categories of skills that employers, recruiters, clients look for.

Technical Skills

These are specific skills like accounting or programming that you need to complete jobs, which are acquired by formal learning or very focused experience. Proficiency can be ascertained relatively easily by a functional expert who understands your field.  

Here are many popular and sought after Technical Skills on a Resume

Job Skills (also called Business or Professional Skills)

These top professional  skills are what enable you to deliver your work deliverables effectively.

Critical thinking 

Collaboration

Team focus

Problem solving

Business Communication

Negotiation

Process orientation 

Soft Skills or Interpersonal traits

You take your personality to work, and it impacts how you relate to people and vice versa. Skills like creativity, empathy, trustworthiness, humor, and cultural fit enhance or adversely affect not just your output but even of those who work with you. Similarly, your interpersonal communication with coworkers is a vital soft skill.

Discover the top business and workplace soft skills and assess yours.

Here’s an example of the 3 types of skills for a job if you’re looking for a role in performance based digital marketing.

📌 Your Technical Skills include a knowledge/ certification in Google Analytics, Facebook lead generation and A/B ads. Work like this needs a strong data-centric approach and attention to detail (job skills) but also needs you to work with other functions and make persuasive recommendations, which are essential soft skills.

Show up SMARTER with the right combo of  resume skill examples!

In general, technical skills are straightforward to share. But you also have a plethora of valuable work and soft skills that employers love. But how do you share skills effectively in your resume?

Create a list of job skills and pick the top 3-5 that are your strengths. But instead of sharing them as a laundry list which is neither impactful, nor sometimes credible, the smart way is to thread them seamlessly in your narrative. 

Resume skill examples and how can you effectively list skills on a resume (and elsewhere too)

Explore these 4 ways and resume skill examples to enrich your job skills and share your interpersonal traits in your resumes, portfolio, LinkedIn Profile, even cover letters.

A. Use in all the 4 basic resume types

B. Mention – and elaborate on – the Skills on your LinkedIn Profile

C. Include in Resume Videos

D. Incorporate in your Portfolio, Personal Pitch Decks or Evaluations

A. Use in all the 4 basic resume types

“Which skills can you list on your resume?” is a popular question that confounds many, since space is at a premium.

Brands and hirers are increasingly looking for proficiency skills, which blend both your work and soft skills. 

You can smartly list your skills in any of the 4 resume formats in different ways, plus use the examples or adapt them for your skills. 

(1) chronological so that it follows the timeline of your experience, starting with the latest first. 

(2) skills based (recommended when there are experience gaps) you should definitely incorporate skills since a lot of automated screening tools like ATS look for them. 

(3) a combo of these 2  resume formats which most applicants use 

(4) customize your resume to the role, and focus on the specific skill sets as well. This takes longer and needs to manage the versions meticulously, but this method is ultimately, most rewarding since you tailor your narrative to the job description.

1. Add resume skill examples within your Experience section.

Punch up your work experience by sharing them as actual skills based outcomes. This is a great place to write and mention not just your technical skills but also include the doer or job skills that help you execute your work competently.

Example of using technical (project planning) with job skills (negotiation)

📌 Consistently negotiated deliverables with vendors, and secured timely milestones for 3 different projects.

If you have a Skills focused Resume (2), then include more professional skills 

📌 Strong process skills and ability to work well with teams, under tight deadlines,

Do you have limited work experience or gaps in your work history? Here’s 12 Smart Ways to Find a Job with no experience.

2. Describe wins with resume actions verbs and phrases.

Adding an Achievements section in your resume(s) is a smart move, since everyone reads that. Choose succinct and well-chosen portfolio or resume action words.

📌 Created 12 brand best practices by working with internal teams, external agencies and customer insights.

3. Add soft skills to your resume Summary

Demonstrate your communication skills, your teamwork ethic or willingness to collaborate with/ within your team. And then take them further with powerful Action Statements that highlight your efforts and wins.

Use a phrase,

📌 Successful team leader

Or a complete sentence

📌 Highly successful cross-functional collaborator across functions  [including; Sales, Accounting, Creative and Production.]

4. Punch up your ‘Why should we hire you? Statement!

A lot of companies have their own job application portals and they have this specific suitability question for candidates to summarize why they are a fit.

Here’s where you can write a powerful synopsis of all your abilities & traits and why you. I highly recommend that you glean the Keywords from the job description and incorporate (truthfully) the relevant ones.

This example makes for a compelling Why Me statement because it showcases ALL your skill types.

📌 I’m a seasoned HR Professional with 15+ years of industry experience, and the ability to build strong relationships with empathy and objectivity.

B. Mention – and elaborate on – Job Skills & Interpersonal traits on your LinkedIn Profile

A great place to share details about your professional journey is your LinkedIn Profile. Not only can you update the tags on the Skills Section of your LinkedIn Profile, but also proactively mention them in your Summary and Headline text.

Get inspired by these awesome LinkedIn Headline Examples!

📌  Demonstrated ability to show results in a fast-paced, high growth environment.

Similar to the examples above, you can share your technical skills and soft skills under the individual Experience section too. 

📌  Improved our NPR scores YoY by clearly communicating goals and best practices across departments.

📌  Created 2 new training programs to improve customer response times for the frontline

Create skills tags or hashtags

A more recent but popular practice is to use hashtags in resumes as well as your LinkedIn Profile which is a great way to draw attention to your skills. 

You can add them under your contact information or right below your individual Experience. Hashtags on LinkedIn are popular not just in posts, but in the Profile as well. 

They work well when you don’t want to or have room for sentences. 

📌 #SmartLeadership reads better than saying ‘I’m a smart leader’ and does the same job.

Use hashtags on Linkedin or your resume individually or as part of a phrase

📌 #SocialMediaAdvertising or #ProjectManagement

📌 #WhatInspiresMe is the ability to create niche products that consumers love.

Explore these Smart ways to use hashtags on LinkedIn

Plus, more hashtag tips and the most popular ones on LinkedIn 

C. Include in Resume Videos

These are short and amazingly effective tools in marketing you to different employers, since they are shareable repeatedly. Video capsules are great places to include your soft skills and personality, while showing off your job skills. Write and carefully edit a powerful, succinct script beforehand, so you can deliver the right action statements naturally (and without sounding rehearsed). 

📌  As a Program Manager, I’m adept at collaborating with cross-functional teams.

📌  I not only bring rich experience in creative writing, my editors love my humorous voice and commitment to details and deadlines

Articulate your top Power Skills and share why you will be valuable to the company and your future team.

D. Incorporate in your Portfolio, Personal Pitch Decks or Evaluations

Your skill examples aren’t limited to jobs or resumes.

Pretty much every time there is a hire for employment or business; collaboration or interaction, your abilities, particularly soft skills are decisive factors. 

How you work individually, how you perform with others and who you are intrinsically are key, so share these without waiting to be asked.

Share the 3 aspects of your work style and personality with panache. And the right words.

Conclusion

Your skills are only as good as the efficacy with which you put them across. So evaluate, finesse and articulate them with care. 

They could very well mean your next job, deal or simply an outstanding impression.

Skill on and shine away!

 Articles by Pooja Krishna

Pooja Krishna is an Entrepreneur, Business Mentor and Mom. She has worked both in large corporates and managed startups over the last 20+ years. 

She’s a co-founder at Maroon Oak, the leading Opportunities & Networking Platform for Women. A classroom mentor, Pooja loves teaching students across the U.S. about entrepreneurship, job & life skills at her company Win Thinks. A day trader for over a decade, Pooja launched Trading Paces to educate amateur and pro stock traders.  Read about her on Huffington Post and Forbes.

A trivia buff and yoga & hula hoop enthusiast, she’s discovering the pleasure of drawing Zentangle patterns for ‘creative mindfulness.’