Applying to New Jobs? How To Best Highlight Your Skills

TradeManagement_HighlightYourSkills

TradeManagement_HighlightYourSkills

When applying for new jobs, you want the hiring managers to see how your skills are a fit for the role. Emphasizing your abilities in your cover letter, resume,  and during interviews is important. Showing you have what it takes to complete the work increases your odds of being offered a position.

Follow these guidelines to highlight your skills when applying for jobs.

Focus On Your Hard Skills

The technical skills required to perform the work must be reflected in your cover letter and resume. You likely learned these skills through education and training. Examples include carpentry, pipefitting, welding, plumbing, and painting.

Emphasize Your Soft Skills

Employers want to see how your interpersonal skills can benefit their company. Examples include communication, leadership, organization, adaptability, and time management. Such skills are extremely valuable because they cannot be taught. They must be developed through experience.

List Your Skills on Your Resume

Explain your hard and soft skills in your resume introduction, experience section, and skills section. Include skills listed in the job description. Use your top achievements to show how you created positive results. One of the best ways to accomplish this is the problem, action, result (PAR) method. State an issue or responsibility you had at work. Show how you used a skill to address it. Highlight the positive results of your action. Use the information to create bullet points focused on your achievements.

Quantify Your Accomplishments

Use data to clarify how you used your skills to positively impact a company. Numbers, percentages, and other concrete information provide a clear picture of your capabilities and value to an organization. For instance, “Hired and trained over 50 construction staff on safety standards when building a grocery store.” Be sure to use power words such as “collaborated,” “coached,” or “designed” to illustrate your impact.

Discuss Your Results

Share with the hiring manager specific ways your skills helped drive these projects to completion. Clarify what you did, what your results were, and how your employer felt about it. Keep your answers concise and focus on the value you provided. Demonstrate what the manager can gain by adding you to their team.

Work with a Recruiter

Partner with a recruiter from Trade Management to help with your job search. Apply with us today.

Self-Improvement – Upgrade Your Skillset Today for a Successful Tomorrow

It does not matter where you are in your trade career today – you should always be thinking about tomorrow. This is not about looking for new jobs, rather focusing on self-improvement to upgrade your skillset, so you are ready for whatever comes next. Consider these four reasons to pursue upskilling.

1. Help you stay up to date with the latest trends.

With new techniques being released frequently for your trade, focusing on learning them can help you stay up to date. The way you complete a task may work, but there is value in discovering new ideas and methods to do something, especially if it increases productivity and efficiency.

2. Make you more employable.

Being dedicated to finding and mastering these new skills and techniques makes you highly employable. Not only do you bring the rest of your talents, but you are also showing an employer your dedication to your career and being a top tier professional. It is advantages like this that can give you the edge over your competition.

3. Improve job security

Once you have a job, you can increase the likelihood of keeping it even longer. If your employer knows your passion for self-improvement and sees the results in the skills you bring to work every day, you have a better chance of job security. While nothing is guaranteed in any field or career, building skills is an important step to give you the best chance.

4. Gain perspective

Sometimes doing similar work day after day can make life seem monotonous. It is not that you do not love what you do, just that you are looking for a boost. In learning new skills, your job remains fresh and new every day. Your perspective shifts to thinking about what else there is to master and how you can bring it to your job to improve what you are doing.

Take your skills to a new opportunity with Trade Management today.

We recognize the skills necessary for today’s construction and skilled trade workforce and want to connect you with the right opportunity. Contact us today to find out more about how Trade Management can help your career.