Last week we discussed the contact information and overview sections of the resume. If this were a sandwich, the contact and overview sections would be the bread. The skills section is the cheese, assuming we’ll have some lettuce and lunch meat on there too.
This section pairs nicely together with the experience section, which we’ll dig into next week!
In my honest opinion, a skills section is not necessary on every resume. Some people may disagree, which is completely fine. My thought process is this: certain listed skills add no value and can often be assumed.
Listing skills such as team oriented, effective communicator, highly organized, etc. are not unique skills and are hard to quantify in a resume. Quite honestly, I make the assumption that everyone has these skills until proven otherwise. Just listing that you are these things doesn’t go far enough.
If you are determined to stick these skills on your resume, make sure you build upon them further in the experience section to show HOW you have gained or built on it. Saying you are team-oriented but then show how you accomplish tasks completely on your own is counterproductive. The same goes for communication or another similar skill. Talk about who you communicate with and how, rather than appearing that you don’t interact with others and instead complete heads down tasks.
Either way, there are other skills you can list within the skills section that are beneficial. These are “hard skills”, rather than the “soft skills” that include previously listed items.
This is a great place to list technologies you work with, languages you can speak, job duties you excel at, etc. Don’t be afraid to tailor this section to the specific job you’re applying for. Again, make sure you add onto the skill within your experience section.
Whatever you do, only add skills that you actually have. If you learned Spanish 20 years ago but can’t speak it anymore, it serves absolutely no purpose. The same goes with technologies you’ve never used, or duties you’ve never actually done.
If it’s on your resume, it opens up the door to be asked about it in an interview. Chances are, you’ll look like a dufus when you admit it’s not real.
At the end of the day, you should be displaying your skills effectively. You can either utilize the bullet point approach or the list approach, both of which are displayed below.
Either way, don’t let this section take up more than a few lines of space. Distribute the bulleted skills into columns if necessary, or stick the section on the side. If this section takes up the whole page, the reader will likely be exhausted from reading and will never make it through the rest.
When done correctly, a skills section can propel someone’s resume to the top. It shows an employer a short snippet of the tools a candidate is coming in with, and invites them to keep going and learn more in the experience section.
Educate yourself on the type of skills an employer is looking for in the position, and use that to exemplify the areas that describe you. From there, it’s time to write an effective experience section!
See you for it next week.
This article is my own and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TEKsystems.
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