Soft skills, particularly organizational skills, have irreversibly become of the same importance as hard skills. Moreover, possessing and knowing how to effectively demonstrate organizational skills related to your particular role is bound to give you a competitive advantage over other candidates. Have never heard of the secrets of successful resume construction? We are here for you to give a clear understanding of what organizational skills stand for, why they matter so much, and how to effectively include them in your resume.
First, let’s define what kind of animal organizational skills are, and why a candidate with organizational skills is usually worth the weight of gold nowadays. So, organizational skills are either inborn or acquired abilities that allow you to use your resources like time, energy, mental capacity, and physical space effectively and efficiently so that you achieve your goals. The most common examples include the following:
However, there are many more specific skills that we’re going to cover in our article. You may have never even thought of possessing any of those, however, our list of strong organizational skills may help you acknowledge them and use them as a powerful tool during your next job search. On the other hand, you might also discover some useful information that will give you insights into what to improve in yourself so that you could increase your chances of promotion or better job opportunities.
The benefits of including organizational skills on your resume can hardly be overestimated. First and foremost, many companies tend to look for a team member, not just a cog in a machine. They seek a person who would share both wonderful blessings and heavy burdens of their working routine. Of course, it’s much better to do with a like-minded person, a team player, the one who will pull their weight when moving toward the common goal. For a candidate, a company that is so responsible when picking another member of their team is also a favorable sign; they may be sure that this company cares who their community consists of and sticks to the principles of a healthy work environment. Besides that, you can create an image of a worthy candidate due to these things:
We’ve collected the most sought-after organizational skills and their descriptions so that you could identify which of them you can already brag about in your CV. However, in no way should you break the most important rule – include a reasonable number of them and only those that you genuinely possess. Otherwise, the hiring manager will crack you like a nut during the interview and will hardly add your candidacy to their talent pool.
It’s not a coincidence that we put this one on the pedestal as managing your time efficiently will not only benefit your professional life but your personal life as well. Should you learn how to correctly allocate your time between tasks and complete them in a timely manner, you’ll hardly ever face the need to work overtime. If you’ve figured out how to meet deadlines, deadline-related stress might be completely eliminated from your life. So, implementing time management skills in your working routine will not only benefit your company but your work-life balance as well.
Problem-solving skills don’t necessarily imply a talent to easily find a solution to any issue. First, you don’t panic when facing a problem. It may sound like a piece of cake, however, the reality is usually more dramatic. Remaining calm and unflappable in the face of challenges, you are more likely to get to the root cause of the problem and faster come up with solutions. Furthermore, this skill demonstrates that you are both an independent and proactive team member without the risk of getting stuck with analysis paralysis.
As a famous proverb says, a clever tongue will take you anywhere. At first sight, one may think that everybody can communicate and why would it be such an asset? However, it’s not only about our physical ability to produce sounds that compose words and then sentences. It’s about the talent to find the right words to approach any person; the talent to use your voice tone and intonation to influence others’ opinions and decisions; or how to use body language to conciliate even the most defensive and reluctant interlocutor. We don’t say you have to master all of those simultaneously, but it would be a good idea to start with something.
These organizational skills also play an important role in your resume skills section. Developing and implementing planning skills in your work routine can result in a series of advantages. For one, you will be able to see your to-do list and prioritize tasks according to their importance so that nothing important slips your mind. By doing so, you can also reduce your stress levels as having the list will make it easier for your brain to navigate the multiple tasks.
Organizing, in its turn, consists of two types: mental organization skills and physical organization skills. The latter obviously means your ability to keep your workplace well-organized and functional, for instance, by maintaining a filing system, record keeping, resource management, and also timely decluttering. Mental organizational skills imply keeping your head well-organized and functional, including improving your attention to detail, boosting self-motivation, developing multitasking and goal-setting abilities, and training memory.
Our world has been so high-paced for a pretty long time and being adaptable to changing conditions and environments is a must if you want to keep yourself mentally safe and sound. New technology appears at the speed of light and employees do have to keep up with it, be fast learners, and accept any changes with curiosity and interest rather than stress and anxiety. Adaptability also includes being resilient to failures and mishaps and developing a growth mindset instead – we’re not our mistakes, we just learn and grow from them.
Unfortunately, only a few jobs may brag about requiring low levels of stress. And if other organizational skills on our list are beneficial for both the company’s prosperity and your well-being, this one is about you only. What happens if we allow ourselves to be consumed by stress? We become unhappy, chronically tired, always anxious, and exhausted. Not for any money in the world should we allow our job to do this to us. Or if it’s us who do it to ourselves?
Let’s be brutally honest and embrace that we are the masters of our life. We choose how stressed external factors can make us and if they can in general. It’s a well-known fact that stress affects our mental and physical health, so your task is to teach yourself to perceive things not as a threat or danger to your peace but as experience and adventure. You can learn more in Kelly McGonigal’s TED talk “How to make stress your friend” about how to turn stress into an activating button for our body to make it produce good hormones instead of harmful ones.
This organizational skill is closely connected with managerial skills. You may find yourself in a non-standard situation with nobody else around. You have to think fast and make a decision on how to cope with it. Have your hands got sweaty yet? Does the idea to shoulder responsibility and make decisions get you uncomfortable? However, this skill can come in handy not only in work-related situations but in your personal life as well. Feeling free to make decisions is the first sign of being mature so no wonder employers value it so much. They prefer working with individuals who are able to back them in difficult situations and lighten the load, not add extra duties to their routine.
This is the key skill for those who aim at managerial positions. God forbid connecting leadership skills with extreme micromanagement, a sticks-and-carrots approach, or holding a tight grip on your subordinates. One should focus on providing delegating opportunities, open communication styles, responsiveness, teaching their team by providing guidance and demonstrating something with their own behavior and not by criticizing. A wonderful example of you having good leadership skills would be stories about how you delegated tasks, or helped increase productivity of your team and therefore customer satisfaction, or how you organized life in your office/team in such a way that it favorably affected the working environment.
Many modern companies consider multitasking to be an extremely important organizational skill and require it on a regular basis. However, this skill is not natural for human beings, therefore, many people may have a hard time dealing with it. Our advice would be to reflect upon your feelings and condition when multitasking, and if it really rattles your cage, you’d better choose roles that don’t require this skill on a daily basis. If it’s not an option for you, these steps may help:
According to the Job Outlook 2022 survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the ability to work in a team shares the leading position with problem-solving skills on the list of the attributes employers tended to seek on a candidate’s resume in 2022. It’s pretty logical as any business consists of people and their ability to cooperate effectively. If you don’t feel like being a team player, there might be internal reasons, like a preference to work independently. However, the issue might lie in the team itself, whether it consists of like-minded and supportive individuals or toxic ones. Teamwork doesn’t really require a lot of effort – just being supportive, responsive, and making an equivalent contribution to the project you’re working together on.
With the help of our list, we hope you’ve identified what organizational skills you may possess so that you can include them in your resume skills section. The next step is to show hiring managers that they are more than just words on paper. We’ve researched organizational skills resume examples and come up with five surefire principles of making your organizational skills section play into your hands.
When you list organizational skills on your resume, remember that each of them should be backed with real examples from your professional life. For example, if you mention possessing multitasking skills, demonstrate how exactly you allocated time or organized the process that allowed you to accomplish tasks in a timely manner without failing any of them. If you claim to have decision-making abilities, provide an example of when you came up with a feasible decision that contributed to your or your team’s success.
Recruiters and hiring managers use ATS or parsing tools to process mountains of incoming CVs. To make your resume noticeable for the program, you should add keywords that are relevant to the role you’re applying for. To define those, carefully read through the job description and focus on the skills requirements section. There you’ll find the key organizational skills an employer expects you as a potential candidate to have.
The majority of soft skills, including organizational skills, are transferable. It means you can use them when switching jobs or professional spheres. Time management, adaptability, or leadership skills are useful for both a project manager and a financial director. Don’t be shy to highlight organizational skills that are not in the job description requirements. This is another chance to show your creativity and deep understanding of the role you are aiming to obtain.
If you’re interested in the project manager position you shouldn’t only concentrate on your leadership talents. Describe how more specific organizational skills helped you perform on a high level in your previous workplace. A project manager who demonstrates how they used strategic thinking to articulate goals clearly or to predict potential risks will definitely attract the attention of prospective employers.
You’ve demonstrated how your organizational skills did good to your previous workplace. Now give your potential employer a clear understanding of how they will do good to theirs. We do recommend doing a bit of research about the company you’d like to work for. You may try to find out their achievements and goals for the near future. Demonstrate to your potential employer how exactly you could use your organizational skills to help them achieve their goals faster or solve their issues more efficiently. A personal approach has never let anybody down!
As you can see from our article, there is a wide range of organizational skills you could include in your resume to boost your chances of getting a dream job. However, you should not bet on their quantity. This is the case when quality prevails. So, pick several organizational skills that meet the requirements in the job description and that you genuinely possess and put these skills on a resume. Prepare real-life situations that can demonstrate using those skills in practice and present them during your job interview. If you have some other organizational skills that are not on the list of requirements in the job description, think about how exactly the company could benefit if you apply them as well. And remember, it’s never too late to start developing organizational skills as they are helpful not only in your professional life but your personal one as well.
