List of Key Strengths for a Resume: Personal and Professional Examples

Your resume is more than just a list of all the jobs you’ve ever had. It’s a piece of marketing intended to demonstrate your top skills to potential employers in a way that will make the hiring manager want to meet you. This guide will help you understand how to present the skills that make you unique so you can more effectively stand out in a competitive job market.

Understanding and Communicating Your Strengths

To determine your strengths, consider the attributes that set you apart from others professionally. Consider your knowledge, skills, and abilities that outshine others. It’s not bragging – it’s identifying how you contribute to the success of your organization.

When you think about your strengths, you might immediately focus on professional core competencies such as project management, data analysis, personnel management, or technical proficiencies related to your field. Personal attributes such as patience, ingenuity, integrity, and creativity also influence how you perform in the workplace.

Why You Should Highlight Strengths on a Resume

When evaluating candidates to decide who to interview, hiring managers will often scan a resume to determine a job seeker’s strengths, so including the correct language on the resume can make a real difference. Don’t assume the hiring manager will determine your strengths by reading your job descriptions or bullet points. Make it apparent to them by mentioning them precisely on the resume.

The key terms and phrases you use on the resume to communicate your strengths should align with the job posting. Look through the job description to identify keywords repeated multiple times, and include those concepts on your resume to convince the hiring manager you can do the job well.

Identifying Your Strengths

Assessment Tools

Identifying the strengths that make you unique can be hard because most people don’t consider their everyday work to be anything special. You may consider taking an assessment to help you come up with ideas. Here are several assessment tools to consider:

• CareerFitter
• CliftonStrengths (formerly StrengthsFinder)
• DiSC Personality Assessment
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
• Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI)

Professional Feedback

One of the best ways to learn about your skills is to ask people who work with you. Whether formally (through performance reviews) or informally (through casual conversations or mentoring), you can ask your colleagues or your boss what stands out as your top strength. You may learn something about yourself you didn’t know that will help identify your unique value.

Categorizing Your Strengths

Think about your skills in two ways:

Personal strengths

• Adaptability and flexibility
• Communication
• Confidence
• Creativity
• Dependability
• Empathy
• Integrity
• Interpersonal skills
• Optimism
• Resilience
• Self-discipline

These strengths are typically intrinsic and impact how you interact with others. 

Professional strengths

• Conflict resolution
• Customer service
• Decision-making
• Delegation
• Innovation
• Negotiation
• Project management
• Strategic planning
• Team leadership
• Technical skills
• Time management

Your professional strengths are most applicable at work, and they produce tangible results in the workplace.

Incorporating Strengths on a Resume

Skills Section

List your strengths prominently on your resume to ensure hiring managers and recruiters notice them. You could have a section called “Key Strengths,” “Areas of Expertise,” “Skills and Qualifications,” or “Core Competencies” to list your strengths specifically.

The strengths you choose to include should be appropriate for your industry and field. You should also mirror the language in job postings for your target roles to tailor your strengths and make yourself more attractive to hiring managers.

Impactful Bullet Points

In addition to a section on the resume specifically listing your skills, use accomplishments-driven bullet points in your “Professional Experience” section to showcase your strengths. Along with a strong action verb to start your bullet points, give examples of real-world outcomes that tell the reader how you used your strengths to make a positive impact.

Here are several examples of effective bullet points that highlight a skill (in bold) in the context of an accomplishment:

• Reduced expenses by 45% by conducting a detailed cost-benefit analysis of 12 existing systems and decommissioning three costly and outdated tools
• Introduced six new reports through Salesforce, empowering a 15-person sales team to pursue up to 50 leads per day
• Delegated daily tasks to a team of 11 graphic designers to complete more than 250 client projects monthly
• Streamlined month-end reporting by creating a new Excel pivot table, which reduced errors by 22%.

Skills-Based Resumes

When switching industries or moving into a role where you don’t have direct experience, you might want to consider a skills-based resume instead of the more traditional chronological resume. This format emphasizes how you’ve used your strengths rather than including specific bullet points under each role you’ve held. 

Here are three examples of skills-based resumes you could consider:

Examples of Strengths for Different Roles

Management and Leadership Positions

Key strengths to showcase on a resume for a leadership position include communication, emotional intelligence, decision-making, strategy, vision-building, solution-seeking, team empowerment, delegation, employee motivation, and conflict resolution.

Technical and Information Technology Roles

In a technology-related field, highlight technical proficiencies such as programming languages or software and hardware skills. You may also include security, end-user support, technical project management, analytics, Cloud-based tools, and information technology (IT) infrastructure.

Creative and Marketing Roles

For more creative positions, focus on your strengths related to storytelling, communication, content creation, cross-functional collaboration, customer focus, data analysis, and strategic thinking.

Health Care Positions

If you want a job in the health care system, add strengths in empathy, resilience, patient advocacy, bedside manner, critical thinking, time management, care plans, medical knowledge, or understanding of insurance and billing to your resume.

Education Roles

For educational jobs, include strengths such as classroom management, curriculum design, cultural competency, communication styles, learning processes, lesson planning, teaching methodologies, subject matter expertise, and lifelong learning.

Tips for Enhancing and Demonstrating Strengths

Learning and Development

No matter how long you’ve been in an industry, role, or company, you can build your skills and sharpen your strengths. Consider finding online courses, workshops, certification licenses, or webinars to attend.

You might also find a mentor who’s willing to give you tips and advice about how to advance in your career. Be open to learning new things from more experienced professionals in your field. Find a mentor by interacting with more tenured coworkers or attending industry events or local/virtual networking groups.

Hiring managers need to know the strengths that make you a good fit for the job. Be intentional about identifying your skills, then communicate them clearly and intentionally on your resume to be more effective in demonstrating how those strengths will make you an excellent addition to the team.

Download resume templates, interactive tools, and resources to show your skills and build a stronger resume.

Andrew Stoner

Executive Resume Writer and Career Coach

Andrew Stoner is an executive career coach and resume writer with 17 years of experience as a hiring manager and operations leader at two Fortune 500 Financial Services companies, and as the career services director at two major university business schools.