The Most Important Personal Skills

When you make up a summary, one of the most important things here is to include your personal abilities that help you stand out among other candidates. It doesn’t matter in what sphere you work; the employer opts for workers with a great-developed ability to deal with people. 

Any worker with excellent personal abilities greatly contributes to the company’s projects and positively influences his coworkers. We agree that it’s hard to include your personal qualities in summary, but we’re here to help you with that. In our post, we’ll discuss – what the most significant personal abilities are, what personal skills the employers value the most, and how to highlight them in your summary. 

Before we know the most significant individual abilities, let’s understand what they signify and why they play such an important role. Personal abilities (also known as soft or interpersonal abilities) represent the individual’s qualities that have connections with social interaction in various ways. These abilities are characterized by excellent transferability since your working style and personality is automatically transferred to your workplace.   

Besides individual abilities, you need to have hard abilities. These abilities signify technical skills (like computer programming and knowing languages). Compared to the personal ones, hard abilities are acquired (you need to study and develop them). 

Generally, HR managers value personal abilities the most since they’re harder to acquire and develop. The combination of personal and hard skills will make you a unique candidate that will stand out among others. 

Again compared to the hard abilities, the personal ones are challenging to find (yes, we understand that it sounds strange). We spend a lot of time developing our hard abilities, but less time we dedicate to our skills. And we should change this.

Employers value those workers who can not simply perform tasks – they value those who can build relations with their colleagues and do their job. We know it’s challenging, but if you demonstrate that you can do it, you can beat everyone at various stages of the hiring process.  

So, there’re plenty of individual skills, and we will not name them all – we’ll describe the most important ones:

• Communicational abilities: Every job comprises communication with people. It does not matter whether you speak personally, write e-mails or speak on phones; knowing how to communicate with people can facilitate your life (in many senses of this word). Communication abilities comprise various skills like active listening, correctly responding to questions, maintaining body language open, etc.
• Interpersonal abilities: These abilities are relatives to communication skills since you cannot interact with anyone at your job without them. These abilities are valuable, as they help establish contacts with people and fit into different teams. 
• Management abilities: These skills play a significant role in motivating other colleagues; no matter you are the manager or simply supervise the project. If you want to be a true leader, you need to have self-confidence and well-developed interpersonal abilities. These skills help manage the team that consists of different-by-the-nature people and take responsibility for the projects they supervise.
• Resolving-the-problems ability: Generally, the job comprises resolving problems. And employers value those workers who demonstrate creativity, confidence, and intuition during the issues resolving. Some issues take several particular abilities during the resolution. If you want to be a good specialist in problem-resolving, you also need to know people you can refer to in this case.
• Time arrangement ability: Knowing how to effectively arrange your time on the job is one of the most essential and valuable individual skills. This ability includes scheduling, planning, meeting deadlines, etc. 
• Flexibility skill: Adjusting to various situations is also one of the significant personal abilities. Thanks to this ability, you can become a valuable worker in your employer’s eyes, and he will not let you go. 
• Critical thought ability: This skill helps us effectively do our job and make new ways to resolve all tasks. Besides, it supports the company in its development and improvement; and it’s also the most valuable individual ability in each position. 
• Organizational abilities: It’s far beyond marinating a clean workplace and so on. It’s about time management, organizing the tasks for coworkers, and scheduling to do the job properly and effectively. 
• Creativity skills: It’s also one of the most significant abilities since any sphere cannot develop without it. The ability of creative thinking beyond standard processes can save the company time and money. And any employer will value that. 
• Collaboration abilities: It’s all about working in teams. Most jobs demand team collaboration, and being a team member signifies the project’s success being the main priority and understanding your team.
• Detail focus ability: Making mistakes can bring bad consequences, and detail focus ability can help prevent it. This skill helps to find mistakes and correct them before becoming a big problem for everyone. 
• Reliability and taking responsibility skills: Being a reliable worker doesn’t only mean coming to work on time. It also signifies being a person who will help everyone in any situation. Besides, any worker should also be responsible for all actions and mistakes. These two qualities are also essential and valuable. 
• Self-motivation: Any worker should have this ability; because it helps you successfully do your job and impact the company’s effectiveness and development. 
• Work ethics: This skill is connected with self-motivation, and it’s a faith that hard work comes with its own goodness. Workers with solid work ethics don’t need extra motivation to do their job. Such people love their job and feel proud of it. 
• Professionalism: Among the other mentioned above abilities, it’s probably the most significant. It signifies maturity, self-confidence, taking responsibility for all actions, plus reliability and sincerity in any case.  

And now we’ll say some words about highlighting your individual abilities in your summary.

You know that every summary should be adjusted to the particular vacancy description. It means that you should carefully examine the vacancy and find out the words used for describing the ideal worker. You’ll notice that the abilities we’ve mentioned above are mentioned frequently in the job description. So, it’s not enough to simply name your individual qualities, and you need to demonstrate your qualities and prove them. For example, you’ve supervised the Y project, and its realization has brought the following results… 

This tip is not only for a summary but also for the transmittal letter and the job interview.