One of the best ways to step onto the fast track to career success is by demonstrating your leadership skills — soft skills you use to guide people towards achieving a common goal.
But what are leadership skills that’ll take you to the top? Here are seven key leadership skills to develop in 2024:
1. Communication
It’s impossible to lead without communicating. You need to be able to clearly convey your ideas and feedback to your team members or managers to convince them to follow you.
So whether you’re a recent graduate or a veteran professional looking to get to the next level in your career, work on perfecting your communication skills.
2. Teamwork
If you want to be a good leader, you’ll need good teamwork skills. Even as a team leader, you must be able to work with the individuals on your team to get everyone on the same page. For example, useful team leadership skills include an understanding of how to delegate and group members of your team for optimal efficiency.
3. Management
To be a good leader, you should be adept at managing people and projects, making decisions and guiding high-level strategy. But you also need to manage yourself — e.g., good time management and self-discipline — to lead by example.
4. Interpersonal skills
When you apply for a leadership role, emphasise your personal skills on your CV. Employers want to hire leaders who their employees enjoy following, so your ability to talk to and get to know people you work with enhances your hirability.
5. Adaptability
With AI advancing rapidly into every facet of the workplace, change is the only real constant there is for modern workers. So if you can quickly adapt to new ideas or ways of doing things, you’re well-positioned for leadership.
6. Creativity
If you don’t know how to paint or draw, that’s okay. But as a leader, you’ll rely heavily on your ability to think creatively to solve problems and innovate. For instance, if your company is financially limited, and you find a way to maximise the free features of a tool your managers want to implement, that’s an example of your creative leadership skills in action.
7. Strategic thinking
Being a leader involves using analytical skills to make good decisions that shape a team’s overall strategy. So to be a successful leader, you need to be able to think critically to anticipate and overcome challenges that arise as you lead your team to reach its goals.
How to put leadership skills on your CV
Leadership is an attractive quality for any job applicant. Therefore, if you have good leader skills, showcase those abilities on your CV to make your application stand out to employers. Here’s how to write a CV that emphasises your leadership skills:
- Describe specific situations when you led people to give employers a clear picture of how you can take charge
- Use hard numbers to show employers that your leadership has created positive results
- Put them throughout your CV — especially in your personal statement and work experience sections — to ensure fast-reading employers see them
And here’s a CV with perfectly written, well-placed leadership skills examples:
Examples of leadership skills on a CV
The following example shows how to put leadership skills (highlighted in blue) on a nursing CV. And there’s a list of CVs that show leadership competencies for other industries below:
Download Leader Skills CV Example
Looking at CV examples from your industry is a great way to learn what leadership skills to emphasise to your target employers. For instance, the CV above shows how to highlight leadership skills in nursing:
- Patient advocacy
- Self-discipline
- Training and supervising
- Coordinating with various members of the healthcare team
- Educating patients
So here are more CV examples that show you how to showcase leadership skills if you’re a:
Alternatively, some high-quality CV makers are excellent sources of inspiration. Generate a list of role-specific achievements and look through your selection for any relevant tasks that might explain how you used leadership in a previous job.
And don’t forget to include your cover letter! You’ll need to write a cover letter to send along with your CV for a complete application, so here are cover letter examples that feature leadership skills to look at:
Not confident in your writing ability? Use a cover letter builder to create a professional introduction to employers.
