7 Soft Skills To Put On Your Resume In 2024

Soft skills, more recently being redefined by the term, “power skills,” are an indispensable asset to your career growth.

While not all skills are equal, soft skills as a collective tend to hold some of the greatest value, since they are easily transferable across multiple industries, help you to make a career pivot, and enable you to retain your job and move up the ladder when technical skills alone would not be sufficient.

What Are Soft Skills?

Soft skills are the general, essential skills that are not specific to any particular job or industry, that employers look for when hiring. They are essentially life skills, as you will need them in any situation, from everyday interactions and relationships to handling personal responsibilities, even outside of the workplace.

Why Are Soft Skills Needed?

Interesting fact: one in seven employers say that they most likely will not hire Gen Z in 2025, and 60% state that they have fired Gen Zers over the past year, due to their notorious lack of soft skills and workplace etiquette, while 90% believe that younger workers should undergo training to polish their soft skills and work ethic. The top skills mentioned by hiring managers as lacking in Gen Z included lack of ownership, poor communication skills, and lack of organization skills.

This makes it an overwhelming priority for young professionals and graduates to not only include these in their resumes for future jobs, but also to work hard to ensure that they develop and actually demonstrate them.

What Soft Skills Should I Include In My Resume?

So you might be left wondering, which soft skills are the most important to put on my resume?

Thankfully, there’s a quick and easy way to identify which soft skills are the most essential for you to include within your resume. All you need to do is to review the job description and especially the person specification section, to see what competencies they are requiring outside of the hard, or technical skills.

For example, in the sample job advert from Indeed for the role of an entry-level business intelligence analyst, the following skills were listed as must-haves for their ideal candidate:

“Required Skills:

• Critical thinker with strong analytic modeling and technical skills;
• Versatile and strong communication and writing skills;
• Amazing attention to detail and follow-through;
• Excellent organization and project management skills;
• Ability to communicate effectively with clients and internal team;
• Manage basic data entry
• Familiarity and solid working knowledge with Google Docs, Microsoft Excel, CRM systems and Microsoft PowerPoint, and other necessary computer software.
• Ability to thrive with minimal direct supervision/management”

Provided with this information, you can either put this section through a word cloud generator to extract the main themes, or you can ask ChatGPT what the core soft skills for this position are.

But even with a quick scan through, you can easily identify that some of the main soft skills necessary for this role are communication, critical thinking, collaboration, and self-motivation to work on one’s own initiative.

Given this example, how can you incorporate this into your resume?

For one, you can list strong communication skills, critical and analytical thinking, and the other soft skills mentioned, in your resume’s professional summary and also within your skills highlights section, which should be towards to the top, before your employment history section.

You can also take this a step further and elaborate on how you demonstrated these skills in each role. As an example, in your work experience section, when you mention your last role as a BI analyst intern, you could include how you collaborated with internal teams, and mention the positive results or impact of your work as a result of this collaboration, quantified as much as possible (because numbers speak louder when it comes to talking about your skills and past achievements).

And of course, if you’ve undertaken any courses on LinkedIn Learning, for example, to develop your communication skills, interpersonal skills, or any other soft skills for that matter, be sure to include this in your resume, since demonstrating your commitment to continued learning is impressive.

Finally, your resume’s interests or hobbies section can be a great way to showcase your soft skills. For instance, are you a member of a Toastmaster’s club? This tells the employer that you have worked on honing your communication skills. Are you a president at the Toastmaster’s? Then you clearly have developed leadership skills. Coordinator or other volunteer at the speaking club? That shows that you are great at relationship-building and teamwork.

7 Soft Skills To Put On Your Resume In 2024

Now that you have this framework, here are some other soft skills that you might want to consider incorporating in various ways into your resume:

1. Conflict resolution
2. Stakeholder management
3. Adaptability
4. Creative thinking skills
5. Leadership skills
6. Problem-solving
7. Emotional intelligence

These tend to be the skills that occur most frequently in job descriptions and/or are the most needed by employers, according to data from the survey conducted by the World Economic Forum in 2023, which analyzed the top skills in demand over the next few years.

Whatever your soft skills, find creative ways to display them all throughout your resume and always ensure, most importantly, that they are actually relevant to the role you’re applying for.