How to Convey Industry-Specific Skills on Your Resume

With all the confusion about how to get a resume past ATS, we've gotten a lot of questions on how to best present skills on your resume. And actually, getting past ATS is the easy part -- you just have to map the keywords back to the job posting. But when it comes to human readers, what is the best way to showcase your core skills to support the case for your candidacy? The answer is that it depends on your background, but here is a quick overview: 

For some candidates, we recommend an “areas of expertise” section at the top of the resume, which calls out the candidate's core strengths or specializations in bold. For example, senior-level professionals who have lots of skills can benefit from a quick section that calls attention to the keywords they want a reader to take away from a longer resume. This section can also be helpful for people making a major career transition, candidates who have had complicated, winding career journeys where some of their most relevant expertise would get buried in older roles, or professionals in highly technical fields like animation, design, or post-production who need to quickly communicate fluency in certain techniques. 

However, if you’re an early career professional, have a very straightforward career history, or your most recent skills match the relevant skills of the roles you're seeking, rattling off industry skills at the top of your resume will waste valuable space. Instead, you'll do better by weaving these skills into your resume bullet points and adding context as to how you developed a certain skill, how successful you were at using it, or how impactful your knowledge of that skill was. For example, if you were to list “call sheets” at the top of your resume but don’t include it under a producing job, a human reader will wonder where you got that skill. At the same time, listing it in two places would be redundant.

Similarly, there's no need to separate out highly specific skills like script coverage or creating shot lists. These can easily be woven into bullet points that demonstrate your development or production expertise. And as we've said many times before, you should never list soft skills on your resume without context. For more specific technical skills or languages, you can simply include those in a short section at the bottom of your resume.

Most importantly, remember that your resume is a story, and you need to integrate your skills into that story to make it make sense. They shouldn’t be an afterthought; they should be the meat of your resume.