By now you should know that your resume must be updated regularly. Your resume generally highlights your hard skills. What about the soft skills that have been developed on the job. Certain soft skills are vital to being a successful and effective manager or supervisor.
Here is an overview of soft skills and suggestions on how to add them to your resume to show how you are the right person for the job.
A List of Soft Skills
While it would be great if employers would include in every job description all the soft skills applicable to that specific role, that’s nearly impossible the list would be overwhelmingly long. The good news is that there is a list of soft skills relevant to most management positions.
Soft Skills Relevant to Management Positions |
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| Communication | Teamwork, Adaptability | Adaptability |
| Problem Solving | Collaboration | Public Speaking |
| Confidentiality | Mentoring | Active Listening |
| Time Management | Conflict Management | Ethics |
| Research | Strategic Thinking | Organization |
| Administration | Work Ethic | Cultural Sensitivity |
| Leadership | Emotional Intelligence | Integrity |
Be selective in which skills apply to you and sprinkle them throughout your resume.
The Sections of a Resume
To know where to insert soft skills into a resume, it is important to understand how a resume is formatted.
Resumes usually include a minimum of six sections:
- Contact Information and professional title
- Executive summary
- Skills
- Work experience
- Education
- Volunteer work
See how to insert a soft skill into almost every section.
To create a stronger resume, think about the skills you have that relate to the position you’re targeting. What have you contributed to your current company- maybe a new program or an improved process? If so, list, “Program Development” and “Process Improvements” under your title.
Executive Summary and Skills
Think of the executive summary as a pitch that gets the reader excited to learn more and another prime place to list soft skills.
In the summary you can highlight your ability to enable a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion “(DE&I).” This reflects the cultural sensitivity soft skill from the list above.
SKILLS OR CORE STRENGTH SECTION
This is a great spot to insert soft and relevant hard skills. Again, don’t just copy and paste the entire list. Instead, include skills mentioned in the job description itself. There will be an opportunity to add other skills in the experience section.
Professional Experience
As in the executive summary, in the professional experience section you may describe soft skills using wording that is both direct and indirect but try to stick with mostly indirect wording.
Words like, collaboration, decision-making, strategic thinking, time management and adaptability. These words showcased with examples tell your soft skills and those accomplishments.
EDUCATION AND VOLUNTEER SECTION
You might think that education is a lot like contact information and that you can’t include any skills in this section, but this isn’t true. While soft skills will not likely show up in this section unless you include information about your volunteer activities hard skills will be on display. But by sharing educational achievements, you demonstrate the soft skill of being eager to learn.
Now it’s your turn to identify the soft skills you have and get them into your resume. By using he examples above, you will be able to confidently show ow you are the best candidate for the job and land that interview.
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