Top Strengths for CV to Boost Your Profile

Understanding Strengths for a CV

Your strengths for a CV are any personal qualities that make you a strong candidate for a role. These could be natural personality traits, your working style or skills you’ve learned in your career to date. Any positive element of your experience, skills or personality can be conveyed as a strength in your CV, building a positive picture of your qualities and what you might bring to a role.

Strengths are important to hiring managers as they help them work out how you might adapt to a new position, and fit into a workplace culture. Your strengths will tell employers a great deal about your personality and working style. This can help them weigh up how well you’ll work with line managers and other team members. They can also give an impression of your ability to handle pressure, your suitability for certain types of work, your longevity and your commitment. These are the various critical factors that hiring managers will make a judgement on before deciding if you’re the right candidate for the job.

Key Differences Between Strengths and Skills

While some of your personal strengths might naturally sit in the skills section of your resume, there are some differences between strengths and skills. Strengths tend to be inherent, natural qualities that define your personality, your working style and what you’re naturally good at. Skills, on the other hand, describe things you can work to improve over time.

Depending on the resume format you decide to use, you might choose to present your strengths within your skills list, or in a separate section titled ‘strengths’. If you list your strengths alongside your skills, they’re probably more likely to go in your soft skills list than alongside your hard skills. Strengths might overlap with transferable skills – attributes you can put to good use in various roles or work environments.

On the other hand, hard skills refer more to the technical abilities you learn throughout your training and career. Although your strengths are predominantly inherent, they might inform the types of technical skills you develop. If you’re inherently creative, you might gravitate towards developing creative skills, while if you favour a structured working style, you might excel in logistics or operational skills. In this way, your strengths are an important way for employers to understand you as a candidate and make informed judgements about your ability to do the job.

Top Strengths to Highlight on Your CV

Take a look at these top strengths to list on your CV, which can help employers understand how well suited you are to every position you apply for:

• Communication: the ability to communicate clearly and effectively, either verbally or in writing. Communication skills also include listening skills and the ability to read non-verbal cues.
• Creativity: how comfortable you are developing new ideas and producing creative work such as design, film, photography or writing.
• Analytical thinking: a trait that allows you to see a situation or challenge from all sides, understand the data and make informed decisions. This can be applied to roles working with figures, but it’s also useful in almost any role.
• Self-motivation: the ability to work without external motivation. This will indicate whether employers can trust you to wok independently and deliver without requiring encouragement or monitoring.
• Versatility: this describes how well you can take on new responsibilities or settle into different environments. A versatile employee might have numerous complementary strengths that help them fill various roles in a team.
• Honesty and integrity: this strength can mark you out as a trustworthy colleague that other team members can rely on. 
• Work ethic: this may seem like a basic requirement, but employers value candidates who recognise that hard work is required, and who are prepared to put it in. Mentioning work ethic on your CV shows that it’s important to you.
• Organisation: being organised is a valuable strength as it means colleagues and managers can rely on you to deliver your work on time, and to the expected standard.
• Patience: if you’re a teacher, a doctor or work in any public-facing industry, patience can be an extremely useful virtue.
• Eye for detail: taking care and attention at all times is a key strength that can mark you out for certain roles. An eye for detail is essential for any industry that relies on accuracy, such as law, engineering or statistical analysis.
• Logical thinking: some people have a natural propensity for logical thinking. This is ideal if you’re designing systems, improving efficiencies or working in any highly structured setting.
• Empathy: the ability to understand other people’s lives and emotions is extremely valuable for almost any role working with other people, but particularly for nursing, counselling and social work.

Strengths are important to hiring managers as they help them work out how you might adapt to a new position, and fit into a workplace culture. 

Demonstrating Strengths in a CV

How you mention your strengths in your resume will depend on the CV templates you decide to use. However, most CVs will include four key sections: a CV summary or objective, work experience, education and skills. See below for some tips and examples of demonstrating your strengths in each of these sections:

Crafting a Strong Resume Objective

Your resume objective or summary should be a short, concise paragraph highlighting who you are, what you hope to achieve and the value you would bring to the role. This is the ideal place to reference one or two of your key strengths, so employers can quickly understand whether you have the personality profile required for the role.

Use sentences like the one from the CV example below:

Demonstrating Strengths in Work Experience

Your work experience section is the ideal place to showcase your strengths, and to highlight the ways they’ve contributed to your career successes. Aim to add quantifiable evidence to prove your strengths, such as key metrics, figures and project outcomes.

Look at the example below to see how a candidate might demonstrate their organisation, logic and analytical and skills:

Showcasing Strengths in the Education Section

Your education section can be a showcase for a commitment to lifelong learning and a willingness to be open to new ideas. Alongside your qualifications, list any relevant coursework, modules or extracurricular activities that might show dedication, flexibility or any other key strengths for the role.

Here’s a resume sample bullet point for an education section:

Listing Strengths in the Skills Section

Many strengths will naturally fit into the skills section of your CV, so if you haven’t mentioned them elsewhere in your application, you can reference them here. Be sure to consult the job description for a list of the key skills and strengths the employer is seeking, and make sure you include as many of them as possible in your skills list.

Adding Strengths to Your Cover Letter

Your cover letter is another valid place to reference your strengths in your job application. Select from cover letter templates that give you the chance to expand upon your CV, mentioning key achievements, skills and strengths that help you stand out from the crowd.

Identifying Your Unique Strengths

Identifying and understanding your key strengths will not only improve your job applications, it will help you to achieve maximum potential in your career. Working out your strengths and weaknesses requires self-reflection and a willingness to learn and improve throughout your career.

You can take steps to understanding yourself better by conducting a personal SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats). This helps you process the internal and external factors affecting your performance, as well as identifying strengths that you can put to use in your career and personal life. Another way of better understanding your strengths is to ask managers or colleagues for feedback. You may already receive this as part of an annual appraisal, so take the time to reflect on this when the time comes around.

Finally, you can gain a stronger perception of your unique qualities by undertaking a personality test. These can help you to hone in on your preferred working style and understand why you thrive at some tasks, while struggling with others.

Key Takeaways for Listing Strengths on a CV

When writing your CV, take some time to reflect on your career to date, the skills you’ve developed and the situations you thrived in. These can give you a strong indication of your inherent strengths. Pepper these throughout your CV to show employers what unique qualities you bring, and how well suited you are to the role.

Use a resume builder to create a well-structured and professional-looking CV that helps you showcase your strengths. Jobseeker offers various tools and CV articles that can boost your chances of job application success. Sign up today and also access a wealth of other resources, including cover letter articles, to help you craft a winning job application.