This article speaks to you regardless of your profession as we have gathered the most demanding digital skills employers are seeking from the candidates – most of these are highly transferable skills for any industry or profession.

This comprehensive guide to digital skills includes:

  • How to pick the right digital skills for your resume
  • How to acquire those skills
  • How to list the right skills on your resume
  • Types of skills for professionals in different fields

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Why List Digital Skills on Your Resume?

Today, even a traditional brick-and-mortar store uses computer systems for cash handling, logistics, finance, and marketing.

When you’re applying for a job, apart from your education qualifications and experience, hiring managers put serious consideration into these skills.

Also, the pandemic has defined new norms for industries requiring digital tools to work from home, conduct remote meetings and communications, and manage teams remotely.

Therefore, regardless of the position you’re applying for, you should develop a set of digital skills and add them to your resume to stand out in a competitive marketplace.

How to Find the Digital Skills that Matches Your Profile?

The easiest way is to refer to the job description. Do your research – download 10 to 15 relevant job advertisements – list down the digital skills they’re asking from the job seekers.

This way you can have an idea about the most demanding skills for your profession.

Another way is to ask a hiring manager. Most job advertisements only highlight the relevant skills for the job – there could be digital skills that are not directly relevant, but companies expect the candidates to have them.

For example, for a managerial position, the job advertisement may not state the requirement of Microsoft Office Suite, MS Word, MS Excel, and Powerpoint – but, having these skills would be mandatory to carry out your daily management tasks.

However, you can’t list 100 digital skills on your resume. Therefore, based on the job, you need to pick only the most relevant and demanding skills for your profile.

For example, if you’re a software engineer, MS Word would be a tool that you’ll frequently use on the job – but, there will be more demanding skills you should list on your resume, such as the programming languages you’re comfortable with, data analytics tools, and web development platforms.

Most of these digital skills are available for you to learn FREE on the internet. You just need a mobile phone or a computer and an internet connection to future-proof your career in any profession.

How to List Digital Skills on Your Resume?

You could list your digital skills in an additional section under a separate heading or include them in your experience section.

Both these approaches would give you good results in the ATS, however listing them in a separate section would highlight those skills to the hiring manager. We recommend doing both.

When listing your skills, consider writing about how you used that skill in your last job – talk about your achievements, examples, and results.

Example

  • Google Ads – handled a Google ads budget of $7000/ month
  • Social media marketing – managed the company’s Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn profiles
  • Content creation – one of the videos created for the corporate Tiktok account reached 6 million views
Following is a comprehensive research on digital skills for different professions. Whether you’re in administration, marketing, HR, operations, management, or in different industries such as hospitality, real estate, advertising, or engineering, you will see related skills to put on your resumes.

1. Common Administrative Platforms

You will get to use software such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in many work environments in managerial, executive, and administrative work – these are important skills regardless of your profession and industry.

You can’t miss Microsoft Word as you’d probably use it to create your resume unless you’re using one of our ready-to-fill resume templates.

Some recruiters and employers ask you to submit a presentation as part of the interview which you’ll have to use Microsoft Powerpoint. Another tool you could use to create beautiful presentations is Canva.

Excel is the most demanding tool out there in the Microsoft Office Suite. There’re plenty of online courses where you could learn general and pro-Excel skills.

Hands-on experience in using digital communication channels such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google meets would be another set of common digital tools that you could list on your resume.

If you’re applying for an administrative or HR position, having hands-on experience in the applicant tracking system (ATS) would be an added advantage. If you do not have previous experience using ATS, consider learning how it works with an online ATS.

Moreover, most organizations use ERP and CRM systems of different sizes – SAP and Oracle are popular examples for ERPs – HubSpot, EngageBay, and Zoho are examples for CRMs.

If you’re creating a resume for a job in HR and administration, check out our complete guides to writing similar resumes:

2. Digital Marketing Skills

If you’re applying for a digital marketing position in a company, having the relevant skills would be predominant. Even if your job role does not involve any marketing, having the basic understanding and creativity to perform digital marketing and being social media savvy would add value on many occasions.

If you’re in marketing, consider acquiring and list the following skills on your resume. Pick the most important skills based on the job you’re applying for. Be specific about the skills, platforms, and tools you used.

  • Search engine marketing
  • Search engine optimization
  • Social media accounts creation, optimization, and management
  • Content strategy development and calendar maintenance
  • Web development with WordPress, Joomla, and Magento
  • Content marketing
  • Copywriting
  • Google analytics/ web analytics
  • Digital product management
  • Email marketing with MailChimp and HubSpot
  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems
  • Adobe photoshop/ adobe creative suite

If you’re not a professional marketer and have some skills in digital marketing, you could list them if you think they will add value to your profile.

In most companies digital marketing is not just a marketing department’s work – it needs the collaboration of every other individual. Show the hiring manager that you could be an active participant in executing the company’s digital strategy. You could list a general set of marketing skills on your resume.

  • Digital marketing skill
  • Online marketing
  • Content creation
  • Social media platforms
  • Graphic design/ visual design
  • Video editing
  • Photography and videography

If you’re creating a resume for a job in marketing, check out our complete guides to writing similar resumes:

3. Data Analysis and Business Analysis

In today’s world, businesses make data-driven decisions. To support management to make decisions, there will be separate teams of data scientists who collect, evaluate, and process data. Businesses collect data from various sources and business activities including web analytics, social media interactions, and customers.

Data analysis and business analysis are considered highly demanded professions considering the impact that could make on businesses. For example, a business that analyses the data on customer purchasing habits at their stores would,

  • Store more of that product in all their store locations.
  • Get into contracts with vendors to procure that product at lower costs.
  • Provide promotional prices for that product to attract more similar customers.
  • Create bundle offers to sell more profitable less moving products.

Data is used by companies to create customer profitability, product profitability, product continuation & discontinuation decisions, and many other important business decisions.

If you’re to become part of a data team, you should consider acquiring and listing the following technical skills on your resume.

  • Python, SQL
  • Debugging
  • Cloud computing
  • Java
  • Database management
  • Data mining
  • Statistics
  • Tableau
  • Microsoft Excel
  • Data visualization
  • Data manipulation
  • Minitab
  • Google analytics
  • Data quality assessment

If you’re creating a resume for a job in data analysis, check out our complete guides to writing similar resumes:

4. Digital Project Management

Digital project management comes in many forms – product development, accounts management, product launching, and marketing campaigns are a few of them. This is about managing and streamlining online projects from the concept to completion, within budget.

With most organizations considering their operations as a set of small projects to better allocate resources, the tools, software, and techniques for project management are highly demanded by corporates.

Following are some of the digital skills you could master:

  • Project management software and tools – Zoho, Trello, Airtable, ClickUp, Google Sheets
  • Microsoft 365 – Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Project, Outlook, Excel, Word, One Drive, SharePoint, Planner
  • Video conferencing & communication tools – Zoom, Microsoft teams, Skype, Google meets, Slack

If you’re creating a resume for a job in project management, check out our complete guides to writing similar resumes:

5. Computer Programming

If you’re in software engineering, web development, digital marketing, cloud computing, computer networking, or any computer-related profession, programming should be part of your skills.

List the programming languages you’re capable of working with. Even if you possess the basic coding skills or the programming language you learned in high school would add certain value to your profile in this digital era regardless of the position you’re applying for.

Here are some of the digital skills you could list on your resume based on computer programming skills:

  • Programming languages such as My SQL, Python, C++, Java, Visual basic
  • Software development
  • Mobile app development
  • Web development
  • Web pages design
  • UI/UX design

If you’re creating a resume for a job in computer programming or software development, check out our complete guides to writing similar resumes:

6. Digital Content Creation & Design Skills

Digital marketers today consider “Content is the King”. Businesses spend millions of dollars to create authentic, engaging, relevant content for their brands. Content creation is a major part of any digital marketing strategy.

If you’re in content creation or a relevant field, the following skills would make your application stand out from the rest.

  • Graphic design: Canva, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, CorelDraw
  • Videography
  • Reels and Tiktok conceptualization and creation
  • Photography
  • Photo editing tools: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom
  • Video editing tools: Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects

If you’re creating a resume for a job in digital content creation, check out our complete guides to writing similar resumes:

7. Special Skills

If you possess any digital skills that would create a “Wow” factor in the hiring manager’s head, that could be something to note on your resume. If at some point, the hiring manager struggles to decide between two candidates, they would go for the one with special skills thinking it would bring a fresh perspective to the business.

Your digital skills do not always have to be relevant to the job you’re applying for.

Consider the following skills to list on your resume:

  • Mechatronics
  • Artificial Intelligence & machine learning
  • Augmented reality & virtual reality
  • Digital design
  • Quantum computing
  • Blockchain
  • Web 3.0
  • Full stack development
  • No code development
  • Predictive analytics
  • SaaS
  • Cyber security
  • Gaming

FAQs

Should I write a separate section for digital skills on my resume?

We advise you to put your digital skills in a separate section to get the hiring manager’s attention. You may name the section as Digital Skills, IT Skills, or any relevant subheading. If you’re applying for a job that directly relates to IT skills, you could put a single section for “Skills” and write a mix of soft skills and technical skills in the same section.

What are the top 10 digital skills to acquire in 2022

Here are the top 10 digital skills to acquire in 2022 that will make your resume stand out from the rest of the applications:

  • Adobe Creative Suite
  • Google Adwords
  • Social media advertising
  • SEO
  • AR & VR
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer programming
  • Microsoft 365
  • Database management
  • Data mining