What are soft skills?
Soft skills (also known as transferable skills and personal skills) are related to your personality. These CV skills develop throughout your lifetime and are affected by your:
- upbringing and relatives
- school and teachers
- classmates and friends
- approach to classwork and homework
- personality (for example, introvert or extrovert)
Soft skills differ from hard skills, which are learnt through taking an exam and earning a qualification.
For example, driving is a hard skill learnt through driving lessons and proven with a driving licence.
When you write your CV, add soft skills to show employers that you can—
- interact well with colleagues, managers, and customers
- keep your work organised and up to date
- handle the pressure of your job effectively
140+ soft skills examples
Here are the top soft skills for your CV:
Communication skills
Communication skills allow you to put your points across and explain your ideas clearly. They’re necessary in any work environment.
In an office, you need to explain problems to your manager; as a delivery driver, you need to let customers know about any delays; and as a customer service representative, you need to help clients by speaking clearly on the phone.
Here are some specific communication skills:
- Presentation skills
- Negotiation skills
- Oral communication skills
- Writing skills
- Foreign language skills
- Effective body language
- Friendliness
- Feedback skills
- Good telephone manner
People skills
People skills ensure you can get on well with others, whether they’re colleagues, clients, or professionals in the same field as you.
Employers seek applicants with outstanding people skills in every field. Even if you’re a freelancer who works from home, you’ll need to be able to make small talk and be personable when sending in your projects to put yourself on top of the project manager’s list when they’re assigning new freelance projects.
Here are some other personal attributes related to people skills:
- Social skills
- Empathy
- Friendliness
- Compassion
- Conflict resolution skills
- Charisma
- Sales skills
- Persuasiveness
- Mediation
- Honesty
- Good sense of humour
Skills for care
If you’re writing a nursing or caregiver CV, you should highlight your skills for care. These types of soft skills should highlight that you can create a rapport with patients, understand their needs, and make them feel cared for.
Here are some examples:
- Empathy
- Good bedside manner
- Setting people at ease
- Breaking bad news
- Liaising with patients’ next-of-kins, friends, and family
- Interpreting care needs
- Communicating with other care staff
- Clearly explaining how a prescribed medication or treatment works
- Firmness
- Hygiene
Flexibility
Flexibility is the ability to adapt to new situations. Flexibility is a skill we’ve all had to develop because of Covid-19, for example by working from home.
Related skills include:
- Improvisational skills
- Can-do attitude
- Adaptability
- Multitasking
- Working from home
- Cross-training skills
- Crisis management
- Challenging myself
- Being able to work flexible hours/shifts
Leadership skills
Leadership means setting a vision and guiding your employees towards it. It also involves setting a tone for your workplace or tone and setting expectations in terms of output and workplace behaviour.
Here are some of the key leadership skills:
- Ability to project self-confidence
- Awareness of others’ abilities and needs
- Management skills
- Goal setting
- Appraisal skills
- Coaching skills
- Project management
- Selflessness
- Trust
- Delegation skills
- Mentorship
- Disciplinary skills
Interpersonal skills
Interpersonal skills are similar to people skills, but refer more to your ability to understand and relate to other people, whereas people skills refers to your ability to create positive feelings in other people.
Here are some examples of interpersonal skills to add to your CV:
- Counselling skills
- Active listening
- Empathy
- Emotional intelligence
- De-escalation
- Reliability
- Positive attitude
- Conflict resolution
- Open-mindedness
Management skills
Managerial skills are vital if you’re responsible for the work of other people, which includes supervising them, providing feedback, and assigning them work. Such skills include:
- Project management skills
- Administrative skills
- Mentorship skills
- Interpersonal skills
- Delegating
- Supervisory skills
- Budgeting skills
- Planning skills
- Workflow improvement skills
- Constructive feedback
- Recruitment & hiring
- Report writing
Customer service skills
Because the UK’s economy is dominated by service-sector jobs, it’s likely you’ll deal with clients in whatever role you end up in. So having good customer service skills is crucial, including:
- Pleasant demeanour
- Conflict resolution
- Stress management
- Flexibility
- Initiative
- Organisational skills
- People/interpersonal skills
- Problem-solving
- Patience
- Upselling
- Diplomacy
- Cultural consciousness
- Helpfulness
- Oral communication skills
Creativity
Finding creative solutions to problems is essential in most jobs because it shows you can handle whatever problems arise. Creativity also refers to the ability to create unique work, essential in jobs as varied as teaching, journalism, writing, and graphic design.
Here are more skills related to creativity:
- Originality
- Out-of-the-box thinking
- Design skills
- Imagination
- Observation skills
- Inspiration
- Experimenting
- Creative writing
- Graphic design
Networking skills
Networking skills are important not only if you’re looking for a new job, but also if you’re trying to secure new connections and business opportunities for your firm. Here are skills you need for networking:
- Affability
- Public speaking
- Small talk
- Diplomacy
- Negotiation
- Communication skills
- Presentability
Problem-solving skills
Employers expect employees to come up with solutions to problems rather than idly ignore them and wait for them to go away. Highlight these problem solving skills by listing these related skills on your CV:
- Creativity
- Perseverance
- Out-of-the-box thinking
- Analytical skills
- Research skills
- Self-confidence
- Logic skills
Teamwork skills
Teamwork is vital more than ever because teams may not be able to meet face to face because of the pandemic. Show that your teamwork skills are unaffected by the current state of the world by highlighting these skills and attributes on your CV:
- Charisma
- Presentation skills
- Morale boosting
- Interpersonal skills
- Empathy
- Collaboration skills
- Collegiate
- Cross-training
- Teambuilding
- Sympathy
- Mediation
- Motivational skills
Organisational skills
Being organised means you can keep on top of your work, quickly find files or delivery orders, and manage your time effectively to keep your boss happy.
Here are some related skills:
- Time management skills
- Filing
- Records keeping
- Cleanliness
- Project management skills
- Coordination
- Memorisation
- Attention to detail
- Accuracy
- Business etiquette
- Logical reasoning
- Lateral thinking
Time management skills
Time management abilities let you know what to prioritise, keep ahead of deadlines, and improve your efficiency. For good time management, you’ll need these skills:
- Prioritisation
- Planning skills
- Budgeting
- Goal setting
- Multitasking
- Task triage
- Self-management skills
- Perseverance
- Agility
Where to add soft skills to your CV
It’s common sense to add soft skills (as well as your hard skills) to your CV skills section, but a key CV tip is that you should dot them throughout your CV to prove to employers that you have these skills.
After you’ve mentioned a soft skill in your skills section, show how you used that skill to provide context. The two best sections of your CV to illustrate your soft skills are your CV’s work experience section or your personal statement.
For example, if you listed customer service skills on your CV, here’s how you can prove that you have excellent customer service skills in a work history bullet:
- Took an average of 47 lunch orders each day during Greggs’ busy lunchtime shift, maintaining a consistent 99%+ customer satisfaction rating
You can also showcase your transferable soft skills in your CV’s personal statement (also known as a CV summary). For instance, this applicant’s soft skills are highlighted in green:
