Money Magazine wrote an article about “The 8 Best Skills for Career Changers“, and the author lists LEADERSHIP as the second best skill for a career changer to have and to showcase on their resume as a transferable skill.

Leadership is one of those skills that everyone claims to have but few know how to list on their resume effectively.

It’s an important soft skill.

Up until relatively recently, companies thought that hard skills are what would get them their bottom line.

Now we’ve come to realize that soft skills are just as important when it comes to growing a company. Soft skills are considered to be behaviors and traits such as adaptability, critical thinking, people skills, likeability, time management and innate leadership.

How do you show that you have strong leadership skills in a concrete, measurable manner on your resume?

(1) Use specific leadership skills mentioned in the job ad on your resume.

Job ads will, often times, have the type of leadership written into them. This way you customize your resume for the target position. This technique is far more effective than sending everyone the same generic resume.

(2) Provide solid examples.

Anyone can say they have leadership skills, but not everyone can prove it. Make sure you have examples of achievements to back it up. Not sure how to do this? Attend my next Resume Writing Training to learn how to demonstrate these achievements on your resumes.

(3) Use verbs related to soft skills.

One of the biggest mistakes executives make when writing resumes is avoiding the use of verbs. A quick way to remedy that is to use verbs that are associated with leadership skills.

(4) Highlight your leadership qualities.

Being a leader in the workplace requires the use of multiple soft skills at once. Simply put, you can’t be a leader if you don’t know how to deal with people. Highlighting your leadership qualities on your resume can help you bring in very important related soft skills into your resume.

(5) Use measurable, quantitative results.

If you really want to impress a potential employer with your leadership, find quantitative results to quote on your resume that demonstrate your leadership in action.