What hard skills are and why they are important

Hard skills are measurable, practical abilities, often acquired through education, training, and experience, enabling a person to perform a specific function. Examples include language fluency, coding, and writing.

Hard skills are vital to every job and industry. Employers want to see that job applicants have hard skills specific to the job requirements because they show that the prospective employee has proficiency in the field and can do the work required. It can be challenging to get a job without the necessary hard skills, even if you have an impressive list of soft skills.

See What People are Saying About Us

How to use hard skills on a resume

You might have more hard skills than you realize, but it’s crucial to choose skills that match the requirements of each job.

• Start by evaluating your overall skill set.
• After writing down your list of skills, pick out your hard skills.
• Review the job description and highlight the required and “nice to have” hard skills.
• Match your hard skills to those you identified from the job description.
• Go through your list once more, looking for hard skills that don’t appear in the description but are relevant to the position, and add those to your final list.

Now you’re ready to weave the hard skills from your final list throughout your resume, namely in the resume objective or professional summary, work experience, and in a separate skills section.

• In your resume objective or personal summary, explain how your hard skills make you an asset to the company. Most companies use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to pick out resumes that contain hard skills noted in the job description, so add some of those keywords to your objective or professional summary to get noticed by ATS.

  For example, the following summary contains several types of hard skills, including
  information processing and management, planning, analysis, as well as
  technical applications and technologies:

  “PMP-certified technical project manager with more than 15 years of experience developing and managing technical specifications, project milestone and sprint plans, requirement analysis, and high-level design documents. Expertise in VoIP, Mobile Applications, USB and embedded technologies.”

• Hard skills are measurable, so a great way to set yourself apart is to provide specific examples of hard skills used and what you accomplished with them for each job in the work history section of your resume.

  For example:

  A waitress might explain her duties at a previous job like this:

  • “Operated cloud-based point of sale (POS) systems to input customer orders and process payments for 30+ customers per day.
  • Memorized restaurant’s daily specials and wine inventory and suggested appropriate pairings to guests, often resulting in $500+ in wine sales per evening.”

• Every resume should have a separate skills section. How you display your skills will largely depend on your resume format. You can mix your hard skills with the rest of your skills, create a separate skills section for them with an appropriate heading, or add them to a separate section under a main skills heading. You might choose to list them or put them in context simply.

  For example, a hard skills section for a truck driver might look like this:

In-demand hard skills employers look for

It’s a good idea to use various hard skills on your resume, as long as they are relevant to the job. Because hard skills are job- and industry-specific, you have to tailor your resume to every job. You may use some hard skills on one resume but not another. And job seekers with different backgrounds, job titles and industries can possess some of the same hard skills but apply them differently.

Hard skills that apply to a broad range of jobs include:

• Computer software and hardware
• Research
• Data management
• Mathematics
• Writing
• Budgeting
• Strategy
• Planning