Skills
STANDARD SECTION
SKILLS
A skills section is used to highlight your most relevant skills to make you more appealing to an employer. While one of the more straightforward sections to compose, as a standard section on a C.V or resume, it is nevertheless still very important you get it right! Everyone has skills they can leverage for an employer, but in order to compose this effectively, doing things like studying descriptions of the jobs in the industry you have an interest in, as well as reviewing any notes you’ve taken from organisations you’ve researched in the past, can make all the difference when it comes to determining the types of skills that will impress an employer the most
Like most other areas of your C.V, there are many different ways you can present your skills section. Some modern C.V and resume formats are more elaborate than others, and a few examples of how a skills section can look are shown below
Some skills sections are quite basic, simply typed up on a word document and then added to a C.V or Resume
Others can be more elaborate, taking the form of cleverly designed infographics
Aside from the things like hard, soft, and job specific skills, you can also elect to include other things like certifications and languages in a skills section too, although ideally it is advisable to make separate sections for these types of things
If you are working in an industry where computer skills are a key function of the role, it is also good practice to create a separate subsection to itemize your computer proficiencies
(Any computing skills section should list relevant hardware, software, language, and operating system proficiencies as per the example above)
What types of skills should you add?
Try to add job specific, hard, or soft skills in the first instance, but if you’re lacking these, anything else you can think of in the way of transferrable skills that has relevance will work just fine too
Anywhere from 4 – 12 different skills is a good amount, ideally blended between soft skills, hard skills, and computer knowledge and/ or job specific skills
Where should I include the Skills section on a C.V or Resume?
Contact Details
Profile statement – Career statement, personal statement, or resume objective
Employment History
Education
Skills