What skills to put on resume?

TL;DR

Focus on your genuine technical and soft strengths to differentiate your resume. Key areas to highlight include effective communication, social aptitude, leadership, and relationship building, as these skills provide valuable career insurance. Identify your top two or three strengths to showcase.

Highlight your top two or three skills that blend soft and hard strengths (e.g., a linchpin who can coordinate people and communicate clearly, or a decoder who reads nonverbal cues to guide teamwork). Put those prominently on your resume to show you can both lead and connect with others.

When deciding which skills to include on your resume, you should focus on anything you are genuinely good at, whether those are technical hard skills or personal soft skills . Experts suggest that listing your specific strengths—ranging from storytelling and complex layout design to empathetic listening and emotional intelligence—can provide valuable career insurance in the age of AI.

Research indicates that the following categories are particularly impactful for a modern resume:

• Communication Skills: Being intentional, concise, and clear in both written and spoken formats is considered one of the most important professional skills today.
• Social Skills: These include being a "linchpin" (a person who brings ideas and people together), a "decoder" (someone highly perceptive at reading body language), or a "comedian" (someone who can make others feel at ease).
• Leadership and People Skills: There is a high demand for leaders who can provide constructive criticism, foster psychological safety, and bring out the best in team members through effective coaching.
• Community and Relationship Building: Highlighting your ability to rally people and build communities is a valuable asset to many organizations.

Ultimately, you should identify your top two or three social and technical strengths and showcase them to differentiate your professional profile.