# Personal Skills for a Resume: Which to Include and How to Show Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/personal-skills-for-a-resume/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/personal-skills-for-a-resume.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving building self-awareness at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer The best personal skills for a resume are the ones employers want and you can prove. Seven steps to pick, prove and place them, even with little experience. ## Key facts - Title: Personal Skills for a Resume: Which to Include and How to Show Them - Category: Soft Skills at Work - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Communication, Influence - Primary keyword: personal skills for a resume - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/personal-skills-for-a-resume/ ## What this page covers - The best personal skills for a resume are the ones employers want and you can prove. Seven steps to pick, prove and place them, even with little experience. - Practical guidance for personal skills for a resume - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation The best personal skills for a resume are the ones employers screen for and you can actually prove, with teamwork, communication and [initiative](/knowledge/influence/show-initiative-at-work/) near the top for entry-level roles. Naming them is not enough. Each one needs a concrete example of what you did and what came of it, placed in your experience bullets where a recruiter will believe it. If your work history feels too thin to prove anything, that worry is understandable, and usually mistaken. Student jobs, group projects, volunteering and club roles hold more evidence than most people expect. What makes the difference is where you look for it, and the order you work in. ## Why personal skills carry weight on an entry-level resume Employers hiring new graduates know the work history will be short, so they read the resume for signs of how you will behave once you are on the job. In NACE's Job Outlook 2025 survey, nearly 90% of employers said they look for evidence of problem-solving ability on new graduates' resumes, more than 80% look for teamwork skills, and more than three-quarters look for communication skills. More than 70% also named initiative and a strong work ethic. On a first resume, personal skills are not decoration around the "real" content. They are a large part of what is being assessed. The catch is the word evidence. "Team player" and "excellent communicator" can be typed by anyone, so on their own they prove nothing. A described action is far harder to fake, which is why the steps below spend most of their effort on finding and writing proof. ## How to put personal skills on a resume, step by step The steps build on each other. The early ones decide which skills you claim; the later ones decide how convincingly you show them. ### 1. Identify the personal skills you genuinely have Start with yourself, not with the job ad. Go back through your student jobs, group projects, volunteering, clubs and part-time service work, and note the moments where you worked well with other people or managed yourself well: a deadline you rescued, a new colleague you trained, a disagreement you helped settle, a shift you kept running when someone didn't show up. Three questions help separate real strengths from things you were merely able to do. What did people come to you for? Which tasks went well and left you with energy rather than drained? Where did your work produce a result someone noticed? If your own view feels unreliable, ask a former supervisor, a teacher or a teammate [what they saw you do well](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-identify-your-strengths/). Other people often see strengths you take for granted. If you suspect you have nothing to offer yet, you are in good company. One of the young people we interviewed about [starting work](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/skills-for-education-and-employment/) told us: > As a student you don't expect to be able to contribute anything. Sometimes I felt I could — because being in the education system now, you're actually better placed academically than people who left it years ago. That instinct to underrate yourself is exactly what this step corrects. The pool you build here is what every later step draws from, so it pays to be thorough. If you find it hard to judge your own strengths, an outside measure helps: the free Job Skills Test gives you [a structured read on your strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) to start the inventory from, so you are not working from guesswork. ### 2. Read the job posting for the skills it asks for Now turn to the specific role. Read the posting and mark every personal skill it mentions, whether named outright ("works well in a team") or implied ("coordinates with several departments"). Then match those against the pool from step 1. The order matters. If you start with the posting, you end up copying its words back to the employer. If you start with your own pool, you are matching real evidence to what the role needs. Repeat this step for every application, because postings weigh different skills differently. ### 3. Choose a few skills to foreground Pick the handful of relevant skills you can prove, not the longest list you can assemble. Teamwork, communication and initiative appear high on most employers' priorities, so if you have strong evidence for any of them, they are good candidates. Three skills with solid proof will carry a resume further than eight without it. Relevance is the filter: a resume that emphasizes what the role actually needs is easier for a recruiter to match to the posting. ### 4. Turn each skill into evidence This is the main writing step, and it depends on the choices you made in step 3. For each skill, write a short line built from three parts: the situation, an action verb, and the outcome. Compare "Strong communication skills" with "Coordinated weekly updates between two project groups so the final report went in on schedule." The second never uses the word communication, yet it shows it. Where a result can be measured, such as how many people were involved, a deadline that was met, or time that was saved, add it, because a number makes the skill concrete. Where nothing can be measured, a clear description of the action and its consequence still works. "Took over closing duties at the café when the shift lead left, and trained two new staff on the routine" proves reliability and initiative without a single statistic. Thin experience is not a dead end here. A group assignment where you owned a piece of the work, a club event you helped organize, or a part-time job you held alongside your studies all produce lines like these. ### 5. Place the evidence in the experience section The experience section is where personal skills count most, because it is where a recruiter expects to see what you have done. Weave each piece of evidence into your ordinary bullet points rather than collecting it in a separate block. Verbs such as coordinated, facilitated, organized and led carry the skill inside the description, so the bullet reads as a record of work rather than a claim about character. Often the strongest personal-skill evidence on the page sits in a bullet that never names the skill at all. ### 6. Name two or three skills in the summary, and organize any skills list Once the bullets exist, write the summary at the top of the page. Recruiters skim quickly, so this is where they see your value first. Name two or three of your key personal skills, and tie each to an impact statement rather than stacking adjectives. Because the bullets below already prove them, the summary points to something real. If you include a separate skills section, keep technical skills apart from personal ones so the list is easy to scan. Treat that list as a signpost to the proof in your experience section, not as the proof itself. ### 7. Prepare to talk through every skill you claimed According to NACE, the reason to indicate these skills on your resume is to earn the chance to articulate them further in an interview. A skill you claim on paper becomes a question in the room: "Tell me about a time you [worked in a team](/knowledge/teamwork/teamwork-examples-for-interview/)." Before you submit, make sure every personal skill on the page has a story behind it that you can tell in a minute or two. Rehearse those stories out loud, not only in your head. Saying them aloud shows you where an example is vague or where you skip over what you actually did. If a skill has no story behind it, take it off the resume rather than hope it isn't asked about. ## The skills that make your personal skills believable Notice where the effort in those seven steps went. Very little of it was about finding the right words. Most of it was about seeing yourself accurately, saying things clearly to someone who is reading fast, and making your contribution visible to a stranger. **Building Self-Awareness** is what step 1 really asks of you. Knowing what you are genuinely good at, rather than merely competent at, comes from looking at how you work, how a task makes you feel and what results it produces, and from asking people who have watched you work for specific feedback. With that picture, you stop guessing which skills to claim and choose the ones you can stand behind in an interview. **Communication** decides how your evidence lands. A recruiter scanning your page needs the main point first, stated clearly and briefly, in terms that fit what they are looking for. The same principles carry straight into the interview, where your examples have to come across as a conversation rather than a recital. **Influence**. A resume is a pitch, and influence rests on a well-earned reputation: results delivered consistently, initiative taken without being asked, a specific thing you are known for. Showing the times you volunteered to organize something or stepped in when it was needed tells an employer what you are likely to do once hired, and presenting it honestly, without overselling, is what makes it persuasive. If one of those three feels shaky, it is better to know now than in an interview. The Job Skills Test, which covers **twelve work skills** including these three, can show you [which skill to build first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), and every one of them improves with deliberate practice long before your next application. Some of this may already be part of how you work. If a teammate once handed you the group presentation because you were the one who could explain it, or a manager at a weekend job left you to close up alone, someone has already trusted a skill you have not yet written down. The skills you have not built yet are not fixed. You develop them by practicing them in your own way, without having to become a different person. As you take on more responsibility, more of how you are judged tends to rest on these skills rather than on what you studied, and each of them can be strengthened from wherever you stand today. The useful next move is to find out where that is. ## See which personal skills you can lead with All that is left is to check your starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it scores you across all twelve and shows which ones will make the biggest difference to your resume and your interviews. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes 7 minutes, results shown instantly.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? The best personal skills for a resume are the ones employers want and you can prove. Seven steps to pick, prove and place them, even with little experience. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Communication, Influence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/personal-skills-for-a-resume/ Preferred summary: "The best personal skills for a resume are the ones employers want and you can prove. Seven steps to pick, prove and place them, even with little experience." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.