Here’s Why You Should Include Soft Skills on Your Resume 

You can add all the skills you want on your LinkedIn profile, but space is limited on your actual PDF or paper resume. You might find yourself trying to figure out which skills and experiences to include, and which ones to leave out. Often, people choose to omit soft skills in favor of harder ones to showcase their technical proficiency — but there are a few reasons why you should definitely add a couple.  

“[Soft skills] are great to have on your resume,” Merri Lemmex, managing partner at training organization Lemmex Williams, said during a recent livestream series about soft skills. Having these soft skills listed out on your resume gives you an opportunity to talk about your experience and examples of instances when you put soft skills into practice. “Just make sure that if someone says to you, ‘What is problem solving?’ you’ve got a really good answer for it,” Merri said.  

Ahead, we’ll go through some of the most important soft skills to include in your resume and how to showcase them during an interview. If you want to start building your soft skills today, we recently added over 70 free courses on professional skills to our catalog. Whether you want to become a more effective communicator or get better at measuring outcomes and business results, there’s a course that will help you level-up in your career. If you get started now, you can confidently step into any role and shine.

The most important soft skills for your resume 

Communication 

Strong communication skills are a must for almost any role, and they become even more important as you advance in your career. For instance, say you completed the Data Scientist: Analytics Specialist career path and landed your first job. Even if you’re a master at cleaning and analyzing data, your communication skills will play a role in how well you’re able to share your findings with your teams. Different stakeholders have different priorities, and knowing how to adjust your messaging for your audience is crucial. 

Fortunately, building and demonstrating your communication skills can be easy. Check out our free professional skills courses on communication, and get started with Effective Stakeholder Communications for Technology Professionals.

Problem-solving 

Problem-solving skills are essential for many jobs — especially as you grow and take on more responsibility for resolving problems that fall under your domain. For example, software engineers regularly fix bugs and errors in applications and cybersecurity specialists mitigate and respond to cyber threats. In either case, you’ll need critical thinking and logical skills to come up with efficient solutions. Read this blog about problem-solving tips for developers to pick up a few pointers.

Project management 

Many people juggle multiple projects at work, and it takes a skilled hand to balance them all. Keeping a project on track can be tough, and issues arise often, so knowing how to navigate blockers and obstacles and properly allocate your resources is essential. Along with shifting deadlines, company goals and strategies evolve over time, and you’ll need to know how to reprioritize accordingly. In the course New Project Management Essentials, you’ll learn foundational project management concepts like how to identify project scope and stakeholders.

Empathy 

Empathy can help UX designers better understand their users and create better products. It can help the head of an engineering team better support their team members and find more personalized, intrinsic motivators. You need to understand people to work with people, and being receptive and understanding of different perspectives can help you collaborate more effectively and contribute to a positive team and work environment. 

How to include soft skills in your resume 

Adding “communication” and “problem-solving” to the skills section in your resume might help send the right signals, but as Merri said, it’s on you to back it up with proof. You can provide more detail in your work experience section to illustrate how your soft skills play a role in your actual work. For example, you can demonstrate your communication skills by highlighting responsibilities that include giving presentations or collaborating across departments. 

Here are a few examples of ways you might write out soft skills on your resume: 

Facilitated communication between dev team and C-level execs for seamless collaboration.  Led development initiatives for specific projects or time periods, showcasing technical expertise.  Incorporated team members’ feedback and suggestions into project workflows, fostering a collaborative environment that enhances the overall quality of the final deliverables.  Received positive feedback for delivering a client-facing presentation that clarified the benefits of a new software feature in a way that resonated with a non-technical audience. 

And remember: Your behavioral interview is when hiring managers are going to really witness and assess your soft skills in action. As you discuss your resume points in greater detail, keep these points and examples in mind.  

Level up your soft skills 

We know it can be challenging to work on your soft skills if you’re not already employed. If you’re still building your skills or need experiences you can include use to demonstrate them in your resume, here are a few tips for training your soft skills. Be sure to take our free professional skills courses today to start adding to your expertise even before you land a job.

This blog was originally published in November 2023 and has been updated to include details about our new professional skills courses.