With a career full of experience it can be hard to figure out just which skills you should emphasize on your resume. There are some easy ways to determine which skills you should be focusing on.
Here’s a quick list of some techniques that will help you pick out which skills to feature along with a couple of tips of how you might want to highlight your most important ones on your resume.
- Review job descriptions.
The easiest way to figure out which skills you need to highlight is to review the job descriptions for the jobs you want to apply to. Pay close attention to the words each employer uses to describe the necessary skills and requirements they have for the role. Keep track of the skills most frequently in-demand for the types of jobs you are applying to. These are the words you should make sure to include in your featured or highlighted skills section. - What is your expertise, and what are your strengths?
Do an inventory of your skills and experience and be sure to emphasize your core or key strengths, those skills you rely on most to be effective at your job. Self-assessment can be difficult, so you may want to take an aptitude test or personality quiz to figure out which ones are the most dominant for you. - Review past performance reviews, and customer or peer feedback.
Consider the words others have used to describe your work, which activities your past managers have most valued, and the qualities they use to describe you as a professional. This type of feedback can be used throughout your cover letter, resume, and interviews. It can be difficult to figure out how to speak about yourself as a professional, so let your peers’ and managers’ words help you develop your self-marketing language. - Check out any industry publications, blogs or articles.
Keep on-top of trends in your field and the skills associated with them. It’s important to continue learning as well as to keep your resume current by highlighting in-demand skills and experience. - Review the work experience of others in your field.
It’s easier than ever to check out the online profiles and work history of people in your profession. See what others in your field are highlighting and how they talk about their experience. Keep an eye out for good examples and borrow phrases and words that you think fit your experience as well. - Ask a peer if you can review their resume.
You don’t want an identical resume to anyone else, but it can be helpful to see how other professionals frame and express their experience. You can sometimes find key skills, knowledge, and experience that you’ve forgotten to mention by reviewing someone else’s example.
Now that you have some of the key skills you want to highlight, here are a few different ways to draw attention to your featured skills on your resume:
- Create a list of highlighted skills and put it at the top of your resume, directly under your objective statement.
For example:
| Key Business Competencies |
| Electronic Data Capture (EDC) • Business Analysis • eLearning Systems • Project Management • Process Improvement • Team Leadership • Information Systems |
- Call out your featured skills with a bordered text box. This can be a good way to share a short list of featured skills without taking up much space on your resume. It also allows for a few sentences worth of space to provide a career summary or overview. This type of introduction can be helpful especially if you are changing careers and your resume needs extra framing.
- Pick three key characteristics or skills, and create bullet points that elaborate on each of these skills and describes your experience related to that skill. An example of one skill might be:
- Relationship Management – and then list the number of years of experience, and your approach to maintaining and developing business relationships.
- Relationship Management – and then list the number of years of experience, and your approach to maintaining and developing business relationships.
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