What Are Job Skills and Why Do They Matter?

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. 

What are job skills?

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?

course

Creative Thinking: Techniques and Tools for Success

In today’s ever-growing and changing world, being able to think creatively and innovatively are essential skills. It can sometimes be challenging to step ...

4.7

(3,750 ratings)

264,311 already enrolled

BEGINNER level

Learn More

Average time: 1 month(s)

Learn at your own pace

Skills you'll build:

Creative Thinking, Problem Solving, Creativity, Brainstorming

Examples of job skills

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. 

Top job skills for 2022

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.  

Top workplace skills for 2022

• 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 

Top technical skills for 2022

• 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 for resumes 

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.

Job skills as keywords

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.

Next steps 

Develop or strengthen your skills by earning a Professional Certificate from industry leaders such as Google, Meta, IBM, Salesforce, and more on Coursera. Programs take between four and seven months to complete, depending on the time you're able to dedicate, and are designed to teach you career-ready skills. You can learn more about social media marketing, project management, and data analytics, among other topics.

professional certificate

Google Data Analytics

This is your path to a career in data analytics. In this program, you’ll learn in-demand skills that will have you job-ready in less than 6 months. No degree or experience required.

4.8

(98,895 ratings)

1,368,000 already enrolled

BEGINNER level

Learn More

Average time: 6 month(s)

Learn at your own pace

Skills you'll build:

Spreadsheet, Data Cleansing, Data Analysis, Data Visualization (DataViz), SQL, Questioning, Decision-Making, Problem Solving, Metadata, Data Collection, Data Ethics, Sample Size Determination, Data Integrity, Data Calculations, Data Aggregation, Tableau Software, Presentation, R Programming, R Markdown, Rstudio, Job portfolio, case study

Give your team access to a catalog of 8,000+ engaging courses and hands-on Guided Projects to help them develop impactful skills. Learn more about Coursera for Business.