Posted 11 days by Jonny Grange
Ask most people what their key skills are and they reach for the same five words everyone else uses. Communication, teamwork, problem solving, organisation and attention to detail. None of those are wrong, but none of them tell an employer anything, and none of them are what actually makes you good at your job.
In this blog, we explain what a key skill is, the three types every candidate has, a step-by-step method for identifying yours, how to prove each one with evidence and how to use the result in your job search.
What are your key skills?
Your key skills are the abilities that make you effective in your work and that an employer would pay for: the technical skills specific to your role, the soft skills that shape how you work with others and the transferable skills that hold their value across different jobs and industries. A key skill is one you can evidence with a specific example and a result, not a word you have seen on other people's CVs.
The test is simple. If you cannot describe a time you used a skill and what happened as a result, it is not yet a key skill you can sell. It may be a skill you are developing, which is useful to know too.
The three types of skill every candidate has
Most people only think about one of these when they describe themselves. All three matter, and employers weigh them differently depending on the role.
Hard skills
Hard skills are the technical, teachable abilities specific to a role or industry: a programming language, a design tool, a marketing platform, data analysis, financial modelling, a professional qualification. They are the easiest to list and the easiest for an employer to check, which is why they sit at the top of most job descriptions.
Read more: Hard skills employers look for in candidates
Soft skills
Soft skills are the behaviours and personal qualities that shape how you work: communication, judgement, resilience, how you handle conflict, how you take feedback. They are harder to prove and employers are rightly sceptical of them on a CV, which is why they need evidence more than any other category.
Read more: The job-ready soft skills employers want from you
Transferable skills
Transferable skills are the ones that keep their value when you change role, industry or career: managing projects, handling stakeholders, analysing data, leading people, presenting, managing budgets. For anyone moving sideways or changing direction, these are the skills that make the case.
Read more: Top transferable skills that employers look for in candidates
How to identify your key skills step by step
This takes an hour or two and is worth doing properly once. The result feeds your CV, your interview answers and your sense of what you are worth.
Step 1: List what you actually do
Start with your current role and the two before it. For each one, write down the tasks you do every week, the problems you are asked to solve and the things colleagues come to you for. Be concrete. "Build weekly performance reports in Looker Studio" rather than "reporting".
The last of those three, what colleagues come to you for, is the most revealing. The things people ask you to help with are the skills your team already recognises in you, whether or not you have noticed.
Step 2: Go back through your achievements
List the results you are proudest of over the past few years. For each one, ask what skills made it happen. A successful product launch might reveal project management, stakeholder influence, prioritisation under pressure and written communication. The achievements are the evidence. The skills are what the evidence proves.
Step 3: Read job descriptions for the roles you want
Collect five or six job descriptions for roles you would apply for and highlight every skill they ask for. The ones that appear in most of them are what your market values right now. Compare that list to your own. The overlap is your core offer. The gaps are your development list.
Read more: How to master the art of reading job descriptions
Step 4: Ask people who have seen you work
Ask a current or former manager, a colleague and someone you have managed what they think you are best at. Their answers will surprise you, and they often surface skills you take for granted because they come easily. A skill that feels effortless to you is still a skill an employer will pay for.
Step 5: Look at your feedback and reviews
Performance reviews, client feedback, references and even thank-you messages all contain evidence of your skills, written by someone other than you. Go through the last few years and note what gets praised repeatedly. Repetition is the signal.
Read more: How to prepare for a performance review (with examples)
Step 6: Pick your top five to seven and attach evidence
Narrow the long list to the five to seven skills that appear most often across your work, your achievements, the market and other people's views. For each one, write one sentence of evidence with a figure or outcome in it. "Stakeholder management: ran the monthly steering group for a £1.2m programme across four departments." That is a key skill. "Good with stakeholders" is not.
How to prove your skills
A skill without proof is a claim, and employers have read thousands of them. Evidence is what turns a word into something a hiring manager believes.
Use results, not duties
Every skill should be backed by what happened because you used it. Revenue, time saved, errors reduced, projects delivered, people developed. Numbers make the evidence land, so go back through your records and find them.
Prepare one story per skill
For each of your top skills, have a short example ready in the situation, action, result shape. These become your interview answers, and having them prepared means you never reach for "I'm a good communicator" when asked.
Be honest about the level
A skill you used once is not the same as one you use every week. Describe each one at the level you can defend. Overclaiming shows up quickly in interviews and even faster in the job.
How to use your key skills in your job search
Once you know your skills and can prove them, they should run through every part of your application.
On your CV
Put your five to seven key skills in a dedicated section near the top, each with a short line of evidence, and make sure they appear naturally in your work history too. Reorder them for each application so the ones the job description asks for come first.
Read more: How to create a skills-based CV to highlight your strengths
In interviews
Your key skills are the answer to "tell me about yourself", "why should we hire you" and most competency questions. Knowing them means every answer connects back to something you can prove.
When you change direction
For career changers, transferable skills are the whole case. Knowing which ones you have and being able to evidence them is what lets an employer see past your job titles to what you can do for them.
Read more: How to write a CV when you're changing careers
When you negotiate
Knowing what you are worth starts with knowing what you offer. A clear list of evidenced skills, matched against what the market pays for them, is a far stronger basis for a salary conversation than a hopeful number.
Identifying your key skills is a few hours of honest work: what you do, what you have achieved, what the market wants, what others see in you and what you can prove. The output is a short list of skills with evidence attached, and it is one of the most useful documents in any job search.
The candidates who present themselves most convincingly are rarely the ones with the longest skills sections. They are the ones who know exactly which five things make them good at their job and can prove each one in a sentence.
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