Many professionals believe that earning a promotion or landing a new role requires the right technical expertise. While important, technical skills often represent the baseline of what hiring managers expect. Increasingly, it’s an applicant’s soft skills that help them stand out.
According to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends Report, 69 percent of surveyed U.S. executives said they plan to prioritize hiring candidates with demonstrated soft skills. Beyond helping you get hired, these competencies support long-term growth by enabling you to take on greater responsibility and leadership.
Soft skills are non-technical abilities and personal attributes that shape how you collaborate with others and approach your role. They influence how you interact with co-workers, engage with customers, and respond to change—determining how effective you are once on the job.
Here’s why soft skills matter, which ones employers value most, and how to highlight them on your resume.
Why Are Soft Skills Important in Today’s Workplace?
Employers value soft skills because they support how work actually gets done. Those with strong interpersonal and communication capabilities tend to collaborate more effectively, navigate challenges with confidence, and build productive relationships throughout their organizations.
Soft skills are highly transferable. Since they aren’t tied to a specific position or function, they enable you to move between roles and adapt as business needs evolve. Communication, for example, is just as valuable in marketing as in operations or finance, making these skills especially important for career progression and leadership development.
The Best Soft Skills to Put on a Resume
No two roles require the same mix of soft skills, but the following are consistently valued across industries and career stages.
1. Learning Agility
According to Gallup, it can take a year or more for a new hire to become proficient in a role. That learning curve reflects how much of a job can be mastered through experience.
Learning agility is the ability to absorb new information and apply it quickly. On your resume, this might look like responsibilities that expanded over time or new skills you developed to meet evolving expectations.
Structured professional development can also signal learning agility. For example, many courses offered by Harvard Business School Online can be completed in as little as four to eight weeks, allowing you to apply new frameworks and perspectives to real-world challenges quickly. That learning pace mirrors the expectations many professionals face on the job and demonstrates the ability to learn efficiently and adapt.
2. Adaptability
Organizations constantly evolve in response to market shifts, customer needs, and internal priorities. Employers value those who can adjust, remain effective under pressure, and help others navigate change.
You can demonstrate adaptability by highlighting moments when you pivoted within a role, took on new responsibilities, or supported a team through organizational change, formally or informally.
If your work experience doesn’t clearly reflect adaptability, leadership-focused learning can help reinforce it. HBS Online’s Management Essentials or Leading Change and Organizational Renewal courses explore how professionals navigate uncertainty, align teams, and lead through transition—capabilities employers often associate with adaptable leaders.
3. Digital Fluency
Digital fluency is no longer limited to technical roles. As organizations rely on AI, software, automation, and data, employers increasingly seek professionals who understand how technology supports business goals, particularly in roles tied to digital transformation or organizational change.
Digital fluency goes beyond using tools; it reflects an ability to discuss technology’s capabilities and limitations, evaluate alternatives, and understand where human judgment remains essential.
You can highlight digital fluency on your resume by noting the software, platforms, or systems you’ve worked with and explaining how they supported business outcomes. This might include contributing to a technology rollout, adapting workflows to new tools, or collaborating with technical teams to improve processes.
4. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Critical thinking—the ability to analyze information, evaluate trade-offs, and draw informed conclusions—has long been valued by employers. It’s through critical thinking that organizations address essential business questions such as:
Because critical thinking underpins many high-value business decisions, employers look for candidates who can demonstrate it in practice.
One way you can speak to your critical thinking abilities is by highlighting complex challenges you solved, whether in your professional summary, cover letter, or work history. Focus on how you assessed options, navigated uncertainty, and arrived at informed decisions that led to meaningful outcomes.
5. Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
In a role that involves working with others, including co-workers, managers, business partners, or customers, emotional intelligence plays a central role in building and managing effective relationships.
In the HBS Online course Leadership Principles, emotional intelligence is explored as a foundational leadership capability—one that helps you understand your motivations, communicate more effectively, and adapt your leadership approach to different situations.
In practice, this skill supports several important goals, including:
- Building trust with customers or colleagues
- Motivating others through change and uncertainty
- Navigating conflict or reaching alignment during difficult conversations
- Managing team dynamics and performance in high-pressure environments
On your resume, you might highlight experiences such as managing stakeholder relationships, resolving workplace conflict, or leading negotiations. Leadership or management courses can further build and reinforce the interpersonal skills employers often associate with strong emotional intelligence.
Strategic Placement: Where to Highlight Soft Skills
Your Professional Summary
Because this section is often the first thing read, use it to spotlight one or two soft skills that align closely with the role. For example: “Adaptable project manager with demonstrated ability to lead others.”
In this case, adaptability and leadership are the soft skills emphasized.
Your Education and Training
Hiring managers review the education section to confirm you meet the role’s requirements, but it can also help signal proficiency in certain soft skills.
Alongside formal degrees, non-degree and certificate programs can highlight strengths such as communication, leadership, and problem-solving—especially when they emphasize applied learning.
For example, completing an online course or certificate that requires active participation, real-world decision-making, and peer interaction can demonstrate how you develop and apply those skills in practice.
This can be true even when a course isn’t explicitly focused on soft skills. The learning model that underscores all HBS Online courses is designed to build those capabilities alongside technical knowledge through applied practice:
- Real-world cases: Participants analyze real-world business challenges shared by leaders and apply proven frameworks to determine a path forward, often informed by diverse peer perspectives
- Active learning: Courses are highly interactive, requiring frequent engagement that reinforces learners’ ability to absorb and leverage concepts in real time
- Social: Learners engage with a global community of peers before, during, and after coursework—exchanging ideas, feedback, and experiences that strengthen communication and emotional intelligence
Your Work History
Your resume’s work history section outlines where you’ve worked, dates of employment, the title(s) you’ve held, and your responsibilities. It’s one of the most effective places to demonstrate your soft skills, often without naming them directly.
Rather than listing duties, focus on how you approached challenges and contributed to outcomes. Many professionals leverage the STAR method. For each role, consider outlining the:
- Situation: The challenge or context you were stepping into
- Task: The problem you were hired to address
- Action: The steps you took to respond
- Result: The outcomes tied to your actions, using metrics where possible
This approach helps demonstrate skills such as adaptability, communication, and problem-solving. It’s also useful beyond your resume; many candidates rely on the same framework to structure responses during job interviews.
Your “Skills” Section
Several organizations use applicant tracking systems to scan resumes for keywords. Including relevant soft skills ensures they’re visible during early screening stages.
How to Develop Soft Skills
Many soft skills are developed on the job, but professional development or upskilling can help accelerate that growth.
Through an engaging and interactive learning experience, HBS Online courses enable participants to build soft skills and technical and strategic expertise. In a recent survey of former HBS Online learners conducted by City Square Associates:
- 92 percent developed increased confidence after completing their course
- 91 percent gained skills they could apply immediately
- 66 percent improved their qualifications for a new job
Are you ready to improve your resume and take your career to the next level? Explore HBS Online’s course catalog to find programs that help you build soft skills and technical expertise across business disciplines. Download our free online learning success guide to learn how to get the most out of your learning experience.
