Types of Skills
Explaining your skillset is an important part of writing your CV. However, there are different types of skills, and it’s vital that you display the most relevant skills for your needs. Here’s our explanation on the different types of skills that you can give on your CV.
Soft skills
Also known as interpersonal skills, soft skills are qualities that allow you to interact and work effectively with people. In order to be successful in any role, you will need to work with other people, so it’s good to list some soft skills to show how you would work in a new team. These skills include Leadership, Teamwork and Communication. Although soft skills are valuable, they’re not always enough to get a job on their own - some industries require qualifications or experience. Since they’re not easily quantifiable, it’s not enough to just say you have them, you actually need to be able to back them up with examples of how you’ve used them.
Hard skills
Hard skills are teachable skills that you can easily quantify. They’re abilities or knowledge that enable you to be successful in a particular job. Employers will often look for these skills for positions that require specific skills, experience or knowledge in order to be successful at the job. Hard skills can be things such as a qualification or degree, proficiency in another language, or experience from a previous role such as computer programming.
Transferable skills
If you’re looking to take your career in a change of direction, then you’re going to want to talk about your transferable skills that you can use to help you move across to another job title or industry. They can be general skills or role-related that can be used in a variety of different jobs across different industries. Some examples can be IT proficiency, or language skills. It could also be that you’ve gained great communication and customer service skills from working in retail and are looking to take those skills to an office environment. As always, you should tailor your skills to the job you are applying for.
