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Technical skills are more important now than ever before. After all, telecommuting, conducting business virtually and Zoom calls are still the norm for many workers. Companies are scaling down, cutting back, and changing the way they do business.
If you’re a worker looking to showcase your technical skills on your resume, you’re in luck. This article will cover everything you need to know about technical skills, and how you can perfect a technical skills resume.
Key Takeaways:
Technical skills allow you to perform a specific task and are often considered a “hard skill” that must be learned.
Almost every profession requires some type of technical skill.
Technical skills in data analysis, coding, programming, social media, and project management are in high demand.
Technical skills can be learned through training or classes, as well as self-education.
Technical skills can usually be listed on a resume in the skills section, depending on the template you use for your resume; however it is also important to list accomplishments and quantifiable results to go with the skills.
In This Article
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- What are technical skills?
- Types of technical skills
- More technical skills
- How to improve your technical skills
- How to highlight your technical skills
- Technical skills FAQ
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What are technical skills?
Technical skills are the abilities or the knowledge you need to perform a specific task. They are often considered a hard skill, or a skill you learned through education or training. The interesting thing about the modern job market is that almost everyone needs some technical skills to do their jobs.
The first thing most people think of are tech jobs; a computer programmer needs to know how to code and program to be successful, and those are just a couple of the technical skills they need for their occupation. A statistician might need to know big data analysis and database management to do their job correctly. But those career paths are inherently very technical.
What about other professions?
Because we rely so much on technology, technical skills have spread into almost every job. A server at a restaurant might need to know point-of-sale software, and having that knowledge might get them more jobs more easily. Today’s trash collectors work in a high-tech portable office. That’s right, their trucks are decked out with all types of technology that they need to know how to operate.
These examples illustrate the wide variety of jobs that require technical skills and the even broader scope of technical skills there are.
Types of technical skills
Technical skills come in many forms. Though, when you’re looking to nail a job, you stand a better chance of impressing your future employers if you have technical skills in a few key areas. Obviously, if your job requires some specific skills, you’re going to need those, but you might also find that these can help your chances of getting hired.
Data analysis. We are a world that’s fueled by data. It’s so prevalent in business that just about anyone can benefit from having some sort of data management or analysis background. Big data is a newer field and it deals with incredibly enormous amounts of data.
The ability to sort through that data and narrow it down into data sets that can be used is very desirable. This skill crosses fields and is used in science, business, marketing, medicine, advertising, government, urban development, and more.
Examples of data analysis technical skills:
Big data analysis
Data analytics
Data mining
Database management
Database design
Documentation
Calculating and statistical analysis
Modeling
Research and reporting
Database software certifications
Information management
Numeracy
Coding and programming. Coding and programming often go hand-in-hand, but they’re not the same thing. Coding is basically taking regular language and translating it into something the computer understands. Many people have a remedial understanding of a little coding, like using HTML to create page breaks or underlining.
Programming is more involved as it’s part of software development and includes planning, design, testing, and deployment. Not every profession needs coders and programmers but those computer jobs sure do.
Examples of coding and programming technical skills:
HTML, Python, JavaScript, C++, SQL, etc
Query Software
Data structures and algorithms
Source control
Text editors
Integrated development environment
Database management and creation
Testing basics
Software release
Information security
Cloud/SaaS services
Hardware Description Language (HDL)
Hardware verification tools and techniques
Artificial intelligence
Social media skills. Once upon a time, just having a Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram account of your own was enough to qualify you to say you have social media experience. Not so today.
Everybody has some accounts and there are a ton of different social media platforms these days. Now, to claim you have social media skills you’re going to need to talk about analytics, management tools for accounts, any paid advertising you’ve done, campaigns you’ve headed — if you know what all of this is, then you’re on the right path.
Examples of social media technical skills:
Content management systems (CMS)
Video Creation
Photography
Digital media
Blogging and blogging platforms
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Analytics
Social media management systems
PPC and paid advertising
Social media platforms
Project management. Being incredibly organized used to be the hallmark of a project manager, now the technical knowledge behind this job includes knowing how to use scheduling software, performance tracking programs, financial modeling or accounting programs, project lifestyle management, and of course you’ll need to know a bit about the industry.
In addition, some companies like it if you’re trained in Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Lean Thinking, or another popular approach to managing teams and customers.
Examples of project management technical skills:
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Software
Microsoft Office Certifications
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Productivity Software
Telecommunications
Human Resources Software
Accounting Software
Team management software
Benchmarking
Scheduling software
Task delegation and management
Quality control
Technical writing. Technical writing is not easy. It requires an ability to dive deeply into a topic, understand high-level data, and then translate that data into something that the average person, or someone with a moderate level of knowledge, can understand.
The thing about technical writing is, if you can do that with a degree of success, then you can write just about any business material and be good at it. Writing is a crucial part of the business world because communication is so important. Employers want to hire people who are good writers and who know how to get data out there without confusing or frustrating the readers.
Examples of technical skills for technical writers:
Source documentation
Solid grammar skills
Microsoft word and office
Research
Subject matter experience
Data gathering
Content management systems
More technical skills
The technical skills above are fairly general examples that can help your resume stand out. If you have a little bit of a work history in each of these fields, it’s going to look good. Having mastered some of these skills is even better. But this is by no means the only technical skills there are.
There are career specific skills and credentials necessary for many jobs and some that can also play across different professions. Some addition types of technical skills include:
Blueprint design
Medical billing
Medical coding
Electronic medical records
Sonography
Structural analysis
Mechanical maintenance
Manufacturing
Inventory management
Logistics management
Accounting and finance
Sales and marketing
Website design
Graphic design
Point-of-sale software
How to improve your technical skills
Technical skills might be easy to identify for some, but not for everyone. Then there might be some people who feel like they need to boost their resume. It never hurts to brush up on your technical skills or add a few more to your resume. You can do this in a number of ways.
Take some classes. It obviously depends on the skill, but there are classes being offered for just about anything. There are online classes, in-person classes, technical classes that last just a few hours, and then there are degrees you can obtain after years of school. How much you want to dedicate to improving your skills is totally up to you.
On-the-job training. Why not learn from an expert? You can apply for official apprentice programs or internships to gain a certification or you can go a more informal route and just spend some time shadowing an expert. For some people, this hands-on training is the best way to learn.
Dive in. If you love to do and experiment, you can learn a lot by trial and error on your own. You don’t have to have a degree or a certificate to be skilled at something, just doing it over and over can be all you need to feel like a pro.
Stay updated. Technical skills can evolve and change over time. Imagine if you only knew how to use the very first version of Microsoft Word, it was released in 1983 and came on a floppy disc. Today, knowing how to use that version is an utterly useless skill. That’s why staying on top of technology is so important, no matter what field you’re in.
How to highlight your technical skills
You’ll want to mention your technical skills when applying for a job, especially the ones that are required for that position. There are a few different ways to showcase your accomplishments and technical knowledge and you can use one, a combination, or all of them to create the most appealing application possible.
Technical skills in a resume. This depends on your field and your experience. If you learned different skills in different positions, then you might want to bullet-point the skills under each job listing. If you’ve stayed in the same field, then adding a skills section to your resume (after your professional history or after your education) is a good way to point out your proficiencies.
While a skills section is useful for hitting keywords for skimming hiring managers and recruiters, it’s important that you also include some accomplishments with each of your most valuable skills. To determine which skills are most important to the employer, read over the job description and see which skills are mentioned multiple times or otherwise emphasized as critical.
Then, list at least one accomplishment that relates to using that skill in your work history’s bullet points. That will back up and contextualize your otherwise hard-to-prove skills section. You can also mention one technical skill in your resume’s summary statement, as a way of instantly catching the hiring manager’s eye.
Also, note that keywords are immensely important for applicant tracking systems (ATS) which most large companies use to parse resumes before they reach a human reader. Make sure that you are as specific as possible with how you phrase your technical skills.
For example, if you’re particularly talented with multiple analytics programs, list them all out (Google Analytics, HubSpot, etc.) rather than just writing “analytics.”
Technical skills in a cover letter. Your cover letter is a brief introduction to who you are and why you want to work for that particular company.
It’s also a great place to list your most relevant technical skills and how they make you a good fit for the job. The thing to be careful of here is not listing obvious skills. If you are a secretary looking for a job at a drafting firm, they will expect you to know Microsoft inside and out and you don’t need to mention that. But if you’ve had some CAD training then they might find that particularly exciting.
Just like your resume, avoid giving boring job descriptions and instead focus on achievements that will contextualize your successes in a way that really impreses recruiters. If you can tell one good (but brief) story about a time you leveraged your skill set to accomplish something great, you’ll have a great lead-in prepared for your interview.
The addendum. In some cases, a resume and cover letter simply aren’t enough. It depends on the job and the career the individual has had, but there can be certifications that come with technical skills that you’ll want to attach to your application.
This not only proves you have the skills, but it reinforces your qualifications. If you’re in a field where you’re constantly learning new things and adding skills, then you might want to add an entire sheet devoted to your technical skills as an addendum to your professional resume.
Technical skills during an interview. How you discuss your technical skills in an interview depends on who’s interviewing you. For a phone screening with a recruiter who has very little grasp of the technical details of your job, you want to keep your conversation direct but simple enough to understand.
For example, instead of going into the details of how your latest Python project was able to scrape demographic data and visualize the data simultaneously, stick to just saying something along the lines of “I’m proficient at using Python and have used it for many projects, including several recent ones.”
But when you get to further stages of the interview process where you’re meeting with a hiring manager who’d be your supervisor or talking to potential coworkers about the technical details of projects that are in progress, it’s time to step up your technical lingo and show off your depth of knowledge.
Just be careful not to oversell your talents or exaggerate your past accomplishments. You’re not the only “expert” in the building, so it’s only a matter of time before someone realizes you’re not as experienced as you claim to be.
Plus, hiring managers to respect a candidate who admits what they don’t know but can still frame it as an exciting learning opportunity rather than an embarrassing defect.
Technical skills FAQ
What are the most important technical skills?
The most important technical skills are coding/programming, social media, project management, and data analysis. However, there is a wide variety of technical skills that are both broad and more niche.
Some other essential technical skills are:
Technical Writing
Computer Graphics
Medical Coding
Point-of-Sale Software
Software Testing
Customer Service Systems
Digital Marketing
While some jobs are more dependent on technical skills than others, these abilities can be helpful in just about any profession. Many businesses will expect their employees to have at least a couple of technical skills to succeed in the digital era.
How do you explain your technical skills?
You can explain your technical skills in a resume, cover letter, and interview to catch the attention of a hiring company. Suppose you’re applying for a tech-heavy position; it’s best to mention your core technical skills in your resume and then dive deeper into your experience with these abilities in your cover letter.
However, when you include technical skills in a cover letter, try to focus on the extra special stuff, not just what’s required for the job.
You can further explain your technical skills during an interview while adapting to the particular interview situation. If you’re being interviewed by a recruiter who doesn’t know much technical jargon, keep your explanations very digestible.
On the other hand, if you’re being interviewed by your potential boss who has a long history with your set of technical skills, go all out and describe specific projects in detail. Tailor the description of your skills to the person that’s interviewing you.
What are examples of specific technical strengths?
Examples of specific technical strengths include:
User Experience (UX)
Content Management Systems
Consumer Analytics
Landing Page Copy
Keyword Research
Adobe Software
Microsoft Office
Cloud Computing
The list of specific technical skills is quite expansive. Better yet, there are always opportunities to learn additional technical skills to beef up your resume for future professional endeavors.
What technical skills should I learn?
The technical skills you should learn are the various facets of artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, cyber security, and virtual reality. These are some of the fastest-growing industries around the world in 2022. Having some technical skills in one or a few of these fields puts you a step ahead of the game.
While these are smart technical skills to learn to get involved in emerging industries, it’s always good to be familiar with the traditional abilities, such as useful programming languages like Python and JavaScript.
However, the best technical skills to learn also depend on the job you have/want and the industry you work in. Before getting knee-deep in discovering a brand new technical skill, do a little bit of research into what will be the most useful for your unique professional life.
What technical skills are the most in-demand?
The most in-demand technical skills are C++, SQL, Python, Java, and R. These sought-after technical skills are coding languages. C++, Java, and HTML are the traditional coding languages that many people know, and Python, SQL, and R are all useful for data analysis.
Besides these top five, some other in-demand technical skills are:
Facebook
Ladder
JavaScript
Twitter
LinkedIn
Network Security
Algorithms
Artificial Intelligence
Ruby
This should give you a pretty good idea of what fields mainly require top-notch technical skills – marketing, coding, and data analysis.
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Author
Kristin Kizer
Kristin Kizer is an award-winning writer, television and documentary producer, and content specialist who has worked on a wide variety of written, broadcast, and electronic publications. A former writer/producer for The Discovery Channel, she is now a freelance writer and delighted to be sharing her talents and time with the wonderful Zippia audience.
