Employers are looking for soft skills. In fact, more and more are listing them as part of the job requirements for open roles. More than 6 million job listings included “communication skills,” 5.5 million included “customer service,” and 5 million included “programming” as a requirement on the ZipRecruiter job site in May.
“Even without looking at a specific job listing, we can probably imagine that each job will require the same set of soft skills: teamwork skills, communication skills, problem-solving skills, time management skills ” says Gorick Ng, Harvard career advisor. and author of “The unspoken rules.”
If you’re looking for a job, “your resume is a very, very, very important platform that you can use to embody” those skills, says Octavia Goredema, career coach and author of “Prep Push, Pivot.”
Here’s how to illustrate soft skills on your resume, according to career experts.
Use descriptive titles
“The key here is to be truthful but also be descriptive,” says Ng.
“There’s a big difference between calling me an intern and a social media intern,” he says as an example. “There’s a big difference between calling myself an analyst and a project manager, if I was actually doing that. There’s a difference between calling myself a manager and a communications manager.”
Each of these titles illustrates another facet of the job that shows you have some experience. “Even a word like ‘communications’ or ‘social media’ or ‘project’ or ‘product’ or ‘department’ can go a long way to give people a mental picture of what you’re actually responsible for.” he says.
Think about your work experience for each role you’re describing and consider an additional, specific word or two that describes what you’ve done and what you can do.
Bullets can give examples of your skills
Another real estate resume piece that could be used to illustrate your soft skills is bullet points under each job title that give specific examples of what you’ve accomplished. Each bullet could talk about a soft skill that an employer specifically mentions in the job description or that you think is relevant to the role.
Consider some of your accomplishments in past roles, and when writing these, “think of it as really a Mad Lib exercise consisting of impactful verbs, impactful nouns and impactful numbers,” says Ng.
Let’s say you want to highlight your communication skills, for example, and you work in search engine optimization. A bullet point might say something like, “I gave a presentation to 30 of our clients explaining effective ways to use keywords that resulted in an average 30% increase in traffic for each of their websites.” “Led,” “increase,” and “30%” are a verb, a noun, and a number that give a visceral sense of the kind of impact you had on your company.
The bullet serves to highlight an impressive achievement. Inherently, since strong communication skills are needed to make a good presentation, and because your presentation was clearly successful in helping your clients increase their traffic, you are proving that you are a good communicator.
“It’s almost implied that he would have had to have the skills to make that impact,” says Ng.
‘What language do you use to talk about work?’
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