Professional skills

Why insert the professional skills in the CV with precision?

Professional skills are one of the most important sections of a worker’s curriculum vitae, perhaps even the most considered today.

At a time when finding a stable and profitable job is becoming increasingly difficult, acquiring new technical skills to stand out is becoming essential. There are several people who decide to improve their professional skills by relying on training courses such as the Digital Coach® Certifications on New Digital Professions.

This has led to an excessive equality of CVs in the labor market, the professional skills included in the CV were few and often too similar.

Many unemployed people found themselves wondering as they updated their CVs:

• what are the professional skills?
• What professional skills do I have?
• what skills to write in the resume?
• How to improve your professional skills?

How to improve your professional skills?
Answering these questions accurately allows you to lay the foundations for improving your curriculum vitae by inserting professional skills required by an employer. Maybe you already have these skills, but you just didn’t realize you had them.

Digital Coach® is a booming reality in the training of unemployed, unemployed or workers who want to retrain in the digital field. Today we want to help these categories of people understand how to make the most of their skills in order to increase the probability of arriving at a job interview and then being hired.

Experts with professional digital skills are increasingly in demand. Find out with a test which role you would be suitable for

What are the professional skills?

Professional skills are not limited to a list of “what I can do” and “what tools I can use”. So you can define technical skills or computer skills, however job skills are broader than many might think.

The world of work distinguishes job skills in:

• hard skills: verifiable and demonstrable technical skills
• soft skills: transversal personal skills.

Let’s see what they are and how to enhance the professional skills included in the CVs.

Hard Skills: shows certifiable technical skills

As already seen, these are technical-professional skills that can be acquired and demonstrated in a very targeted and direct way, through a training course, certifications, a school course or operational experience in companies with well-defined roles.

Examples of hard skills are:

• computer skills: use of CMS for managing websites, programming languages, use of the MS Office package;
• organizational skills: quality control of processes based on ISO standards, management of the production chain, purchasing or an industrial department;
• technical skills: specifically the knowledge of professionals, accountants, labor consultants, lawyers, architects, surveyors and so on.

These skills are usually the easiest to incorporate into a resume as they are the easiest to identify and acquire.

Soft Skills: Identify other required skills

The other professional skills called soft skills are those skills that can most distinguish you.

They are transversal personal skills applicable in multiple work contexts, for this reason also called transferable skills. They are those other professional skills that depend on the culture, the school context in which one grew up, the personality, the character developed with the normal course of life.

Some underestimate the description of these skills limiting themselves to giving a summary indication or completely excluding them from their CV. Conversely, others flaunt the so-called “defects on the curriculum”, excessive fussiness or delusions of perfectionism, hoping to make a good impression even with the defects.

Examples of useful soft skills are:

• leadership qualities: ability to coordinate a group in activities aimed at achieving a result;
• problem solving: propensity for lucidity and coldness in analyzing a problem and implementing mechanisms aimed at finding a solution;
• communication skills: being able to express yourself well in public in head-to-head meetings or as a speaker in front of an audience;
• versatility: being able to change jobs within a company by covering different nuances in a given context in a short time;
• stress resistance: ability to work under pressure, especially for deadlines;
• enthusiasm: facing new challenges and changes in a positive way seeing possibilities and not problems in diversity;
• ability to work in a team: leaders who are useless without a group capable of letting themselves be guided, for this reason the ability to know how to work as a team is an added value;
• creativity: develop new ideas, create new products, create texts, innovate some production processes.

Identify the skills required in the world of work which is evolving and needs to increasingly understand these aspects of candidates as well. You can do this by reading various job postings and jotting down those personal aspects you marked as favorites.

The habit of recruiters is to try to perceive these personal skills also from the CV in order to develop a job interview as targeted as possible.

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The professional skills to write in the curriculum vitae

Both categories of professional skills are required , both technical and transversal.

When entering your skills , especially transferable ones, consider the importance of:

1. be truthful,
2. give a good picture of you without being too vague,
3. explain in a practical way how you have acquired and strengthened these skills, in order to indirectly suggest how they can be applied in a work context.

Let’s see examples for both categories, where to insert and how to insert your knowledge, skills and competences.

Insert the technical skills in the curriculum vitae

The practice in the European curricula models listing work experiences and in their description listing tasks and tools in a very summary and rapid way.

In itself this is a good practice to include professional skills in your CV, but be careful, everyone does it.

On the one hand, it is good because possible employers are used to reading curricula in their main parts, and work experience is certainly among the most viewed.

On the other hand you will not really be able to distinguish yourself from the crowd and you will keep the chances of getting to the job interview limited.

In modern cv templates there is a skills section usually indicated in the final part of the sheet. Because of this, many fill out this part quickly, not pausing to insert well-structured texts, but limit themselves to adding some “extra skills” such as musical gifts or quick indications of acquired practical skills.

A gem to enhance the technical skills called hard skills is to insert a good explanation of tools and organizational situations managed in a personalized “skills” or “certifications” section. For example:

Social Media Management: management of the company’s Facebook and Instagram page. Search for new topics, post calendar planning, text and graphics creation with programs such as Canva, Adobe Suite, etc. Creation of periodic statistical reports on the results achieved by the posts.

Google SEO optimization: creation of content in WordPress by positioning them for specific keywords and monitoring the progress of the ranking through web analysis tools (Google Analytics).

Describe soft skills in a curriculum vitae

Many find it difficult to answer the question ” what skills do I have?” in a CV. In some curricula models there is a small section indicating “Personal Skills“, this space can be well used to list those aspects of your personality that explain your person well.

There are also interesting CV configurators online that allow you to insert personalized sections to be titled at your discretion.

Be aware that these parts are the most complex to write as they have a less analytical and more transversal component.

In order to understand your transversal skills, think about your daily life, not focusing only on the world of work.

Ask yourself: is my working style pragmatic and direct or creative and versatile? Do I love challenges and changes? Do I work well in a team and how did I prove it? What contexts make me feel comfortable in carrying out activities aimed at a goal? Am I talkative or do I prefer to listen?

Getting to know you well is the best starting point for creating a successful curriculum vitae.

Once this is done you can enter the “transferable skills”, here are a couple of valid suggestions:

Stress resistance: I worked for 3 years in a professional studio, this got me used to meeting deadlines without feeling overwhelmed by them.

Working in a group: I participate weekly in bodyweight training during which the participants, divided into teams, have to complete tasks. This context has helped me a lot to interface with other people and learn to coordinate with mentalities different from mine.

Problem solving: my passion for new technologies has led me to often test new products just released on the market and find different limits and functions, learning from time to time as a self-taught person to use them despite the initial difficulties.

As you can see, it is not only the working environments that demonstrate your transversal professional skills, but also your daily activities, especially those that you might consider not related to working contexts.

How to improve your skills for the job?

As we have seen, one’s professional skills can be acquired in a targeted way or developed indirectly. They do not derive only from work contexts, but are also developed with extra activities belonging to normal daily life.

Do you want to improve digital skills or computer skills? Choose a training course and earn a digital marketing manager or web developer certification.

Do you want to retrain and acquire new professional skills? Take part in an ad hoc course of study and do an internship.

Do you want to improve your personal soft skills? Why don’t you evaluate training internships that put you in a position to develop them and therefore be able to include these skills in the curriculum?

Digital Coach® in its specialist courses always includes internships in which you work in a team made up of students and professionals for several months, in this way you develop not only technical skills but also personal skills .

Another interesting aspect of its training activity for the labor market is the possibility of using one hour of one-to-one consultancy free of charge with anyone who wants advice from an expert on how to retrain for work.

Increase job opportunities thanks to the new digital professions.
Contact us to understand which professional skills to acquire in order to find work successfully

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