Is your IT resume optimized to highlight your soft skills?

​Your target IT role is in high demand. You possess the right technical skills and experience, but you still are not hearing back from recruiters and hiring managers?
​
More than ever before, companies are looking for the right soft skills when hiring IT professionals. Your resume and LinkedIn profile should be optimized to highlight your soft skills and clearly communicate how you fit in to the hiring company’s culture and work environment. In this post we share the top soft skills companies are looking for when hiring IT professionals.

IT Career Transformation: Is your resume optimized to highlight your soft skills?

​Companies are progressively shifting to do more work remotely. The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly been a key driver for investment in cloud / SaaS based tools designed to improve team collaboration, project delivery and operation management. This shift in the work environment introduces a change in desired skill sets IT professional candidates should possess to work effectively in a remote work setup.
While certain soft skills have always been a key requirement for senior management, technology leaders and other management positions (such as project manager, product manager / owner, and business analyst), more and more companies are looking for soft skills in candidates for all types of IT roles, including technical roles that used to be considered self-contained / task oriented roles.

​The list below is IT Career Transformation’s analysis for the top soft skills hiring companies are looking for in technical IT roles, such as network engineer, security analyst, data engineer, software developer and technical support just to name a few.

​In which sections of your resume should you include soft skills?
Soft skills should be integrated into your introduction, professional experience, and areas of expertise / key competencies sections. You can check out our previous post on how to build a strong introduction to your resume and your LinkedIn section.

​The following is an example of how to integrate soft skills into a professional experience statement:

“Effectively collaborated with diverse infrastructure support groups including network engineering, provisioning, security operations and telecom vendors to analyze and resolve critical issues, maintaining strict service level agreements (SLAs).”
This example communicates at least five soft skills about the candidate including being a team player, interpersonal skills, time management, problem solving and working efficiently under pressure.

In the Area of Expertise (or Key Competencies) section, you can list your key soft skills such as “Creative Problem Solving” along with other professional areas of expertise such as “Network Security”.  
 
Do you possess any of these soft skills? Does your resume showcase your relevant soft skills that hiring companies are looking for? 

---

​Do you or someone you know need help with optimizing your resume and LinkedIn profile with relevant soft skills and keywords to effectively communicate your professional brand?
 
Please visit www.itcareertransformation.com for more information and to schedule a free initial consultation to discuss your career goals and how best we can help!

---

www.itcareertransformation.com | 678.224.8715 | info@itcareertransformation.com