How to Add Hard Skills to Your Resume

Hard Skills

When you write a resume, you need to include a variety of skills to show that you know how to do a specific job. You can typically divide these skills into hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are learned skills that you need to fulfill regular duties in your job, and they’re often skills employers list in the job description. Here’s what you need to know about filling out your skills section with hard skills.

What Are Hard Skills?

Hard skills, as opposed to soft skills, are skills you use for a specific job. They’re teachable skills—you can sit down in a classroom or next to someone who’s already a master and learn about them. You can also learn them through work experience. For example, if you’re applying for a computer science position, you may need to know programming languages like JavaScript, Python, HTML, CSS and Java. If you’re applying for a content management job, you’ll need to know search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM), as well as social media and Google Analytics. If you’re pursuing a career in graphic design, you’ll need to know how to use Photoshop and have design skills in a variety of areas. These are all hard skills because they’re teachable and quantifiable.

Finding Hard Skills That Work for Your Resume

Not every hard skill is going to work for every job application. Hiring managers want different things for different jobs and industries. Here’s how you can find examples of hard skills to include on your resume.

1. Resume keywords from the job description

   The first thing to do is look at the job description. This is known as looking for resume keywords. It helps you develop an understanding of the skill set a particular recruiter wants in a job. If you’re applying to a data analysis job and the job requests someone who’s great at Microsoft Office Excel, has exemplary people skills, and understands QuickBooks, that means you want to include all three of those skills somewhere within your resume. Potential employers put what they’re looking for in the job description, so draw from that information.

2. LinkedIn profiles

   Although LinkedIn is mostly meant for networking, it can also help you in your job search. Especially if you’re applying to a job with a fairly large set of employees, consider going online and seeing what types of skills they’re listing. If you see a lot of people discussing things like adaptability and critical thinking and significantly fewer people mentioning computer skills and job-specific skills, you might want to lean more toward those soft skills.

3. Resume examples in your industry

   Lastly, you can check out resume examples from your industry to see what people are including on their resumes in general. Other job seekers have also done a lot of work, and people looking for the same job probably have a lot of career advice to give. This can also give you a good idea of the ratio of soft skills to hard skills you might want to consider, as some jobs require more or less hard skills and soft skills.