Saturday, December 6, 2008

Hard Skills and Soft Skills, and how to show them on your resume

Have you heard the terms hard skills and soft skills?

A hard skill is on you can see, feel, touch and measure.

Keyboarding speed, abiity to us a specific software program, ability to use any specific machinery or tool. These are all hard skills.

Soft skills are more part of your personality, and so are harder to measure, and more difficult to teach. After all, how do you teach someone to have a good attitude, and how do you measure how good (or bad) it is?

Attitude is only one of the soft skills that employers are actively seeking.

When you apply for a job, both your cover letter and resume should highlight soft skills as well as hard skills.

And because soft skills are difficult to measure, your resume should also make a statement of how you have used that specific skill successfully.

"Hard worker" appears on so many resumes. Anyone can write that down on the resume, and because so many people do, it means almost nothing.

However, add a statement showing when you used this soft skill and it become more believable.

How about this on your resume:

- Referred to as "go to guy" by employer, due to consistency of hard work and problem solving ability

Doesn't that give it more credibility?

So include your soft skills in your resume and add a statement that proves it's true.

Help to find the job that fits your skills.


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