Top Hard Skills and Soft Skills to Put on Your Resume

The Best Way to Include Hard Skills and Soft Skills on Your Resume

You may have gotten career advice that recruiters and hiring managers like to see both hard skills and soft skills on a resume. But what exactly is the difference? Depending on the job, one may be more important than the other. This guide will tell you everything you need to know about hard and soft skills, with examples you can use in the skills section of your resume.

Hard Skills and Soft Skills: Which One is Better?

Both hard and soft skills are needed for most jobs. It is rare to find a role during your job search that requires only one set of skills. However, some jobs do rely more heavily on one type of skill than the other. So what exactly are hard and soft skills?

Hard skills are professional skills. These are technical skills or competencies that usually apply to a specific job. If your job requires a university degree or training program, then you are most likely learning specific skills in order to effectively perform your job. Technical skills are not always learned in a work environment. Hard skills can be learned from studying books or computer programs in school, at an internship, or through work experience. You may have advanced technical skills before even beginning your job search.

Soft skills are interpersonal skills like people skills and communication skills. These are skills that help you work effectively with other people in a work environment. You can be born with great social skills, or you can learn them through participating on teams, in school, and through work experience. Soft skills often improve with life experience, although certain people have well-developed soft skills from a young age.

Neither skill set is better or worse than the other. Soft skills can actually be more difficult to learn than hard skills. If you are someone who doesn’t work well with people, then you may decide to look for jobs that depend more on hard skills, such as computer programming or data analysis. If you’re a people person, but you lack technical prowess, then you may decide to apply for jobs that emphasize communication skills, such as customer service or sales.