Employers filling new positions in 2021 are seeking blue collar applicants who are skilled in driving, cleaning and handling cash, and white collar applicants with strong design, JavaScript and scrum skills. These hard skills are essential in navigating a competitive, volatile job market, a LiveCareer analysis of job ads and resumes found.
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Hard skills are a diverse set of technical proficiencies you hone throughout your career. Acquired through experience or education, hard skills deeply enhance your value to an employer because they take time and energy to properly master.
"Basic hard skill requirements for a position are vital," Jonathan Kidder, a technical recruiter at Amazon and founder of the recruiting blog WizardSourcer, says. "If you don't have those listed on your resume, you get sent to the black hole."
Here are the 20 blue collar and white collar hard skills mentioned most frequently in the 3,500 job ads analyzed by LiveCareer.
Hard skills needed to land a blue-collar job
Hard skills needed to land a white-collar job
Skills gaps persist in every hard skill category
Job seekers in blue-collar and white-collar industries alike often leave crucial skills off their resumes.
Failing to include the right skills on your resume spells disaster. Applicant tracking systems dismiss resumes if they don't include the right keywords with the precise verbiage. And hiring managers and recruiters spend fewer than 10 seconds deciding if an applicant is worth more time.
LiveCareer's assessment of resumes and job ads in 70 jobs and 18 occupations found gaps in every hard skill area, including:
- In-demand coding languages like Python and JavaScript.
- Cross-industry skills in training, design and computer knowledge.
- Industry-specific skills like patient care, some of which were hardly mentioned on resumes at all, suggesting some applicants are using the wrong terminology.
Customizing your resume to the job description for every job application gives you the best chance of getting a call back for the interview.
