Choosing Your Most Relevant Skills To Show To Employers

When you want to apply for a job or update your LinkedIn profile, it can be difficult to decide what parts of all your experience to focus on. What skills to emphasize. After all, you only have so much space available on that resume or cover letter and you want to use that space well while not making it look overcrowded.

Therefore, you will have to choose your most relevant skills to show to your employers. Whether it is in your resume, your cover letter or your LinkedIn profile, or to highlight during your interview, here are our picks for skills that you should really make stand out to employers:

  • Teamwork

This is a no-brainer, almost every hiring manager or recruiter looks for someone that is a team player. Therefore, you need to be able to show that you have great experience working in a team or even leading a team. Make sure to always prepare some examples you can elaborate on during the interview.

  • Interpersonal / communication

Since most jobs require interaction with others, customers, co-workers, suppliers etc., good interpersonal and communication skills are almost always desired. This contains both oral and written communication skills. The latter you can (and should!) already show-off in your written communication with the employer (think about your resume, cover letter, emails etc.). And your verbal communication skills you should definitely also mention in your resume, cover letter and/or LinkedIn profile. Think about presentations that you have given at work or in different places, meetings where you discussed your ideas, or occasions where you convinced people. And, of course, during an interview, you should really show as well that you´re a good communicator.

  • Analytical

Analytical and data skills are in high demand in today´s job market and therefore you should always highlight these to employers. Think about research you have done and data you have had to analyze. These are all good examples to put on your resume and to elaborate on during the interview.

  • Commercial awareness

This is about showing how well you know the business or industry you are working in or want to work in. You always need to show that you have a good understanding of what the company wants to achieve, what the main challenges and opportunities are and how it compares to the competition.

  • Problem-solving

Employers often look for people with strong problem-solving skills. Hence, you should focus on situations where you recognized there was a problem and the action you took to solve this problem.

 

However, all of the above skills are quite general skills. And although you should always show these to employers, there is another type of skills that you should certainly not forget about when choosing your most relevant skills. If you have some very specific or niche skills, these are the ones you should focus on. For example, if you are a big data specialist you should make sure that this gets notified by the employers because these skills are highly sought after. Or, if you are an expert in HTML5, that should be the skills you emphasize in your application or in your online profile. Hence, when selecting the skills that are most relevant to show to future employers, make sure that you highlight the more general skills mentioned above with concrete examples (saying you are a team worker is not going to cut it, you need to come with proof) and your specialist skills. It will be the combination that will make your profile interesting for employers so make sure you focus on the right skills.

 

What other skills do you think are important to show to employers?

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