# Relevant Skills: How to Tell Which of Yours Count for a Job Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/relevant-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/relevant-skills.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 Relevant skills are the ones a specific job needs. Learn how to find yours, what counts with no experience, and how to prove each skill with an example. ## Key facts - Title: Relevant Skills: How to Tell Which of Yours Count for a Job - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Building Self-Awareness - Related skills: Influence, Communication - Primary keyword: relevant skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/relevant-skills/ ## What this page covers - Relevant skills are the ones a specific job needs. Learn how to find yours, what counts with no experience, and how to prove each skill with an example. - Practical guidance for relevant skills - How this topic connects to Building Self-Awareness ## Detailed explanation Relevant skills are the skills that match what a specific job needs. Some are job-specific, like a tool or method the role uses every day; others are transferable, like organizing work or explaining things clearly, built through study, part-time jobs and volunteering. A skill counts when it fits the job and you can back it with an example. That is why no fixed list can tell you which of yours count, and why every posting seems to want something slightly different. If you have a fair sense of what you can do but no clear idea how it lines up with what an employer is asking for, the gap is in the matching, not in you. And matching is a method that works the same way for every application. ## What does "relevant skills" mean? Relevant skills are the abilities, knowledge and competencies that apply directly to a particular job or field. The word doing the work is "relevant": it describes a match between a skill and a role, not a quality of the skill itself. Building financial models is central for a finance trainee and beside the point for a nursery assistant. Calming an upset customer matters a great deal on a support desk and much less in a research lab. So when a job ad or an application form asks for your relevant skills, it is asking a narrower question than "what can you do?" It wants to know which of the things you can do will help with this particular work. That changes where you start: not with your own list of strengths, however good it is, but with the job. ## How do I know which of my skills are relevant to a job? Work from two lists and look for the overlap. Start with the job's list. Read the posting before you write anything about yourself, and pull out the skills, qualifications and tools it stresses: the ones listed first, mentioned more than once, or tied to the main duties. A long posting can feel less like a description and more like a wall. > Job ads are written so convoluted and with so many expectations that you look at them and think: nobody can do this. Whether it's a cashier or a chief physician. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, describing how postings looked to her while she was still a student. The way through is to read the ad for its priorities rather than as a checklist. Ask which three or four skills the work actually turns on, and treat the rest as background. Then build your own list. GCFGlobal's Job Search and Networking tutorial sets out a three-step approach to [identifying transferable skills](/knowledge/types-of-skills/transferable-skills-definition-and-examples/): list your experiences, identify the skills each one used, and compare those skills with what the job asks for. Put everything on that first list, including school projects, volunteer roles, sports teams and part-time jobs, because experience that never felt like "work" is the easiest to overlook. To find the skill inside an ordinary experience, ask what got difficult and how you handled it. A result on its own says little; the way you reached it shows the skill. If the inventory stalls because you can't tell [what you are genuinely good at](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-identify-your-strengths/) from what you have simply done, it helps to [score your current work skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and use the result as a starting list to check against your own experience. Where the two lists overlap, you have your relevant skills. Describe them in the posting's own terms wherever those terms honestly fit what you did. If the ad asks for "stakeholder communication" and you briefed an outside client on a course project, use its phrase, so the match is visible at a glance. ## What counts as relevant skills if I have no experience? Having little work experience is not the same as having no relevant skills. For entry-level roles, employers look for relevant skills, initiative and potential rather than years of professional experience. Coursework, group projects, volunteering, part-time jobs, student societies and sports teams are all legitimate places to find them. What turns that experience into relevant skills is translation: describing what you did in terms of what it would do for an employer. Restocking shelves and closing up a supermarket at night becomes working reliably without supervision and following procedures exactly. Tutoring younger students becomes explaining complex material to people at different levels. Organizing a society's annual event becomes running a project with a budget, a deadline and volunteers who didn't report to you. The experience stays the same; the description points it at the job. Hobbies follow a stricter rule. They belong on an application only when they connect to the role. Running a club's social media accounts is relevant to a marketing job. An interest in films, on its own, is not. ## How do I prove my skills instead of just listing them? Attach one specific example to every skill you claim. A skill named on its own is an assertion; the same skill with a situation and a result is evidence. This matters because the claim will be checked. Employers may ask for a concrete example of any skill on your resume, and they test skills through interviews, reference checks and take-home assignments. The skills that are hardest to prove are the ones written as bare words: "organized," "reliable," "good with people." Anyone can write them, so on their own they carry almost no weight. A practical test before you list anything: can you describe one real time you used the skill in two or three sentences, covering what the situation was, what you did and what came of it? If yes, the skill goes in, and the example goes with it, either as a line under the relevant experience or as [a story ready for the interview](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/personal-skills-interview/). If not, leave it out until you have one. One well-backed skill is worth more than five that would fall apart at the first follow-up question. ## Should I put skills on my resume that aren't relevant to the job? Usually not. A skills section works best when it is limited to what fits the position and [ordered by relevance](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/career-skills-resume/), with the most relevant skills first and the least relevant last. Skills that are true but unrelated don't add weight. They dilute the match the reader is looking for and push the skills that matter further down the page. That doesn't mean throwing those skills away. Keep a master list of everything you can do, each with its example, and build every application's selection from it; a skill that stays off this resume may lead the next one. The exception is a skill the posting doesn't name but the main duties clearly depend on, such as a second language for a role dealing with international customers. If the work needs it, it is relevant, even when the ad leaves it out. ## What's the difference between relevant skills and transferable skills? They answer different questions. Transferable skills are the ones that carry from one setting to another: communicating, organizing work, working with others. Relevant skills are whichever of your skills, transferable or job-specific, match a particular job. Job-specific skills, such as a software package, a lab technique or a coding language, are relevant only where the role uses them. Transferable skills are relevant to many roles at once, which is what makes them so useful early in a career. The Government of Alberta's alis career service makes the point that skills developed in college and university transfer into the workplace, even when the setting where you built them looks nothing like an office. For a student or recent graduate, transferable skills are usually most of what you can honestly claim, so learning to recognize them is the main task, not a fallback. ## Do soft skills count as relevant skills? Yes, whenever the job needs them, and almost every job does. The skills for working with others and managing yourself, such as communicating clearly, working well in a team and managing your time, show up in nearly every role, and they tend to count for more, not less, as a career goes on. They come with a catch, though. Because they are easy to claim, they need proof even more than technical skills do: a line about dividing up the work again after a teammate dropped out of a course project says more about teamwork than the word itself. And they are learnable behaviors rather than fixed personality traits. If one the job asks for is thin in your experience so far, it is something you haven't practiced yet, not something you lack for good. ## Where do I put relevant skills if my work history doesn't match the job? Consider a skills-first, or hybrid, resume. It presents your relevant skills and accomplishments first, then lists employment and education in chronological order. That layout suits applicants whose job titles don't show the match on their own, such as a student applying for an office traineeship with two years of retail work behind them. It lets the relevant skills lead instead of an unrelated title. The format changes the order, not the standard. Each skill at the top still needs its example underneath, drawn from the jobs, projects and activities listed further down. Set these answers side by side and the same three moves keep turning up: an honest account of what you are good at, a reading of the job from the employer's side, and a brief, plain statement of the match with proof attached. None of them depends on a template or a resume format. ## The skills underneath a strong match Those three moves outlast the application. You rely on them in your first months in a job too, whenever a manager asks what you can take on or a new project needs someone with your background. **Building Self-Awareness** is what makes the inventory honest. Knowing your natural strengths means separating what you are genuinely good at from what you can merely get done, judged by how you work, how the work makes you feel and the results you get. Feedback fills in what you can't see yourself: ask a lecturer, shift supervisor or teammate a specific question, such as what you did well on a project, and they will often name a strength you take for granted. That turns a vague self-image into evidence you can lay next to a job posting. **Influence** begins with preparation: understanding what the other side needs before you make your case. In an application, that means treating the posting as a description of what the employer needs done and choosing the skills that do it. Concrete examples persuade where adjectives don't, and a case that is honest about its limits is more credible than one that claims everything. Early in a career, credibility comes from claims that hold up when an interviewer asks for the story behind them. **Communication** decides whether a relevant skill gets noticed at all. The principles are simple to state and easy to skip: put the main point first, be clear and direct, be brief, and adapt to the person receiving the message. On paper, that means the most relevant skill at the top, one plain sentence of proof, and the employer's own term where it honestly fits. In an interview, it means opening with what you did before filling in the background. Each of the three is a set of behaviors that improves with deliberate practice, and the one you find hardest is simply the one to practice first. Before your next application, you can [see which skill needs work](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) with the Job Skills Test, which measures these three as part of a **wider set of twelve**. ## A move you have probably made before Parts of this may already feel familiar. If you have ever shown a new coworker how the booking system works, or rewritten a group report so that someone outside the group could follow it, you were already matching: taking what you know and shaping it around what another person needs. An application asks for the same move, aimed at an employer. Where it still feels awkward, that is a matter of practice, not of who you are, and it gets easier each time you do it on purpose. It also matters long after the hiring process. Once you are in a job, knowing which of your skills a task calls for, and saying so plainly, goes a long way toward getting the work that suits you. Seeing where your skills stand today gives you a head start on both. ## Start from an honest read of your skills What you need now is a clear view of your own starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in about 7 minutes it shows where you stand on all twelve, and which of them will make the most difference to the roles you are applying for. **[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? Relevant skills are the ones a specific job needs. Learn how to find yours, what counts with no experience, and how to prove each skill with an example. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Building Self-Awareness. It also relates to Influence, Communication. ### 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/types-of-skills.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/relevant-skills/ Preferred summary: "Relevant skills are the ones a specific job needs. Learn how to find yours, what counts with no experience, and how to prove each skill with an example." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.