Listing your skills on your C.V. is a great idea, but only if you understand the difference between hard, soft, and transferable skills. All relevant skills fall into at least one of these categories, and whether or not your future employer knows this, it is important that you list your skills with this in mind.
Let’s start by defining these three terms. Hard skills are ones that are set, easy to prove, and require work to obtain. For instance, the ability to code in Python, the ability to speak two languages, or a college degree. These are hard skills, they are things that you are able to do because you logged the time.
Soft skills are, well, softer. Soft skills include communication skills, leadership skills, or the ability to excel under pressure. You can’t show someone a piece of paper that proves that you have these, but they will become obvious through your work. Though they are not as obvious, soft skills can be as or more important as hard skills.
Transferable skills are pretty self-explanatory- they are skills you picked up one place that you can bring to another. Most (but not all) skills are transferable. For instance, in college I worked at an ice cream parlor. There I learned to scoop ice cream, lead a team, and verify sales. The money handling and the leadership skills are likely transferable, but the ice cream scooping is not (unless I am looking to work at another ice cream parlor). When listing your skills on a C.V., think about which skills (both hard and soft) are going to be useful for a new employer.
Take some time to write down all of your skills, all the hard, soft, transferable, and non-transferable skills that you have acquired through the years. From there you want to organize that list into those four categories. This will make it easy to visualize what your skill sets are, making it that much easier to figure out which ones to list on your resume.
The next step is to figure out what types of skills the job you are applying to values. Different jobs require different levels of hard and soft skills, and you want to weigh your list of skills accordingly. For example, if you are applying for a job as a biologist, your hard skills are more important than your soft ones. Though it might be nice for you to be a people person and a good scientist, they mostly only care that you are a good scientist. If you are applying for a position in accounting or law, you need to stress both your hard and soft skills. It is important that you’ve passed the barre, but you also need to be good at attorney-client relations. Then there are jobs like sales or marketing that are much more about soft skills than hard skills. If your communication skills are dynamite, having or not having a business degree is not that important.
Think about what category the job you are applying to is in, and highlight your skills accordingly.
If you follow these guidelines to list your skills everyone who reads your resume will be delighted by how easy it will be to see your areas of expertise.