The right combination of skills could be the key to landing your next job.
Job skills are the various abilities you use to complete your work—from workplace skills like time management to technical skills like programming.
While employers still value credentials like degrees, more and more have been turning to skills-based hiring in order to fill positions. For example, LinkedIn saw two connected trends occur in just two years: The number of jobs that didn’t require a degree grew on the platform by nearly 40 percent between 2019 and 2020, and the number of job listings focusing on skills and responsibilities rather than credentials grew by 21 percent between 2020 and 2021 [1].
Job skills, then, matter more and more. In this article, you will expand your understanding of job skills with detailed definitions and examples, learn how to use them on your resume, and find out what the top job skills currently are based on Coursera’s own user research.
Job skills are the entire collection of skills you use to complete your work. They typically comprise:
Workplace skills: The personal skills that ensure you do your job well, such as being adept at teamwork, time management, or solving problems. Occasionally, some refer to these as “human skills,” “employability skills,” or “soft skills.”
Technical skills: The skills that relate to technical or job-specific knowledge, such as the ability to code in Python, conduct data analysis, or use specific accounting software. These are sometimes called “hard skills.”
Transferable skills: The workplace and technical skills that you can take from one job to another, such as when someone uses their aptitude for teamwork and their ability to code in Python to change careers from being a programmer to being a STEM educator. Transferable skills are any of the various skills that you can transfer between jobs.
There are many ways to acquire job skills. While in some cases they may simply be a part of your personality, in other cases you may have learned them through formal education or work experience. Whatever your skill level, you can always strengthen your current skill set and acquire new skills through practice.
Learn more: Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills: What's the Difference?
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If we do something often enough, it can become so natural to us that we forget it is actually a skill that many others may not possess. It can be helpful to read examples of others employing their skills to help you identify your own.
The following examples describe hypothetical people alongside a list of likely skills that they employ as they maneuver in their unique life circumstances. As you read through it, think about the many skills you already possess.
Example | Skills |
---|---|
A high schooler who regularly organizes a weekly schedule and organizes study groups with peers | Project management Coordination Teamwork |
An accountant who goes through cases alone every afternoon | Accounting software Attention to detail Ability to work independently |
A server who works routinely during busy periods | Communication skills Ability to work under pressure Point-of-sale (POS) system |
A single parent who coordinates with family and friends to ensure their child is watched while they are working | Planning Responsibility Problem solving |
A UX designer who leads a team at a tech startup | Leadership Management skills CSS |
Every year, Coursera compiles a report detailing the top job skills that learners have been developing on the platform. The report describes the key skills that some 92 million learners have been developing over the past year. If you are looking to identify the most relevant skills for the near future, then you will likely find the following job skills lists useful.
The report is broken down into two sections: a human skills section, which describes the workplace skills users are developing, and a digital skills section, which describes the technical digital skills users are learning.
Communication: The ability to effectively communicate ideas to diverse audiences through various media
Change management: Systematically helping individuals or organizations change their processes, goals, or technologies
Professional development: Learning new skills or reinforcing old ones to excel in a career
Storytelling: The ability to craft engrossing narratives that engage audiences
Planning: The ability to identify goals and create a concrete path toward accomplishing them
Influencing: The ability to create change and impact decisions through communication
Decision making: The ability to make informed decisions by collecting information, analyzing it, and creating alternative choices
Problem-solving: Systematically identifying problems and then developing concrete solutions to fix them
People development: Helping other individuals or teams develop their own skills
Human resources: Planning and management of an organization’s various administrative functions, such as the hiring of new staff
Product design: The process of developing product ideas and turning them into tangible products
Plotting data: Visually representing data by plotting them on graphs
User experience design: Subset of design that specifically focuses on the ways that users interact with the product
Statistical visualizations: Graphic representation of statistics through graphs and other visually descriptive media
Security strategy: Identifying and detailing security threats alongside ways to deal with them
Cloud infrastructure: Software and hardware that supports cloud computing
Supply chain system: Organization and management of the supply lines that move goods from suppliers to customers
Social media: The various online platforms that allow individuals and communities to share information among themselves and one another. In business, they are often used for marketing purposes
Operations management: The practice of managing and designing business processes and operations to maximize efficiency
Business process management: The practice of optimizing a business’ various processes, such as onboarding new employees, through a range of research, analysis, and modeling methods
Adapted from Coursera’s Job Skills of 2022 [2]
Job skills—both workplace and technical—are very important to employers looking to fill positions. Many employers are increasingly concerned with finding applicants with relevant skills rather than those that simply possess credentials [1]. It's important to showcase your unique talents on your resume. Let's review one of the key ways to do that.
To deal with the large number of job applications they receive, many companies today use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to pre-screen resumes. These programs use algorithms to scan through resumes, and identify qualified applicants by identifying keywords describing relevant job skills.
Unfortunately, while the systems are well-suited to efficiently parse large numbers of applications, they also have been found to disregard qualified applicants who have not optimized their resumes for the system [3].
Try to use the same phrasing or keywords that employers use in their job descriptions to highlight your particular job skills. Follow these steps to help identify keywords and phrases to use on your resume:
1. Find a job listing that appeals to you and read through the job description.
2. Take note of any required or preferred skills an employer wants candidates to have, and think about how your skill set fits.
3. Adapt your resume by using the exact (or similar) keywords and phrases in the job description that you possess. For example, if you see a job posting asking for an applicant adept at “conflict resolution,” then you might use that phrase to describe your skill set rather than the similar phrase “dispute resolution.”
4. Make sure your resume is easy to scan by using a clean and straightforward layout. A chronological resume is often best suited for this purpose. While it may be tempting to use flashy graphics, many systems struggle to read overly designed resumes and may inadvertently overlook important information.
Consider putting a job description into an online word frequency program to identify the skills that are repeated throughout the listing—these are likely the most important skills to an employer.
Some free online text analyzers include Lexicool and Online Utility.
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1. Harvard Business Review. “You Need a Skills-Based Approach to Hiring and Developing Talent, https://hbr.org/2021/06/you-need-a-skills-based-approach-to-hiring-and-developing-talent.” Accessed September 20, 2022.
2. Coursera. “The Job Skills of 2022: The Fastest-Growing Job Skills for Institutions, https://www.coursera.org/business/ebook/job-skills-of-2022/.” Accessed September 20, 2022.
3. Harvard Business School. “Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent, https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/research/hiddenworkers09032021.pdf.” Accessed September 20, 2022.
This content has been made available for informational purposes only. Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals.