What skills do employers want?

Recruiters are struggling to find candidates with the right skills despite the large number of applications for each job. Discover what skills employers are looking for and how you can sell them on your CV

Your degree will have provided you with subject-specific and transferable skills. It's important to be able to reflect on what they are, and where you gained them.

Where are the skills shortages?

According to ManpowerGroup's 2025 Talent Shortage Survey, 76% of UK employers report difficulty recruiting skilled talent.

Globally, the situation remains challenging, with 77% of employers worldwide facing recruitment difficulties.

The top five in-demand skills in the UK in 2025 are:

• IT and data
• operations and logistics
• engineering
• sales and marketing
• front office and customer-facing.

The most sought-after transferable skills are:

• reliability and self-discipline
• resilience and adaptability
• critical thinking and analysis
• creativity and originality
• reasoning and problem solving.

What are soft skills?

Also known as behavioural or transferable skills, soft skills are personal attributes and abilities that affect how you interact with others and approach your work. Unlike hard skills, which are technical and job-specific, soft skills are more about how you work and communicate rather than what you know.

Employers often value them as much as (or more than) hard skills and they are transferable across roles and industries.

Effective communication

How clearly you put across your ideas, and your ability to listen to others, is an important skill for any job hunter to demonstrate. Employers will be keen to see how you build rapport, persuade and negotiate.

Use your CV or application form to outline specific written and verbal examples of when you've put these skills into practice. This might be any public speaking you've done, or writing for a student newspaper, for example. Show how you tailored your message to the target audience.

Resilience

This refers to your ability to deal with setbacks, and graduate employers have increasingly started to consider it. How well do you cope with stressful situations or when something goes wrong? How do you react to unexpected changes or problems that occur during a project?

You aren't expected to be unaffected by these events, but you need to be able to show that you react to them positively and are able to develop strategies to deal with them.

Leadership and management

Even if you're not applying for a management position, you'll still need to demonstrate to employers that you have the potential to motivate and lead others to achieve common objectives. It's also important to evidence the skill of self-management - demonstrating a situation where you've managed your own time successfully.

On application forms, detail situations where you've had the opportunity to plan and coordinate tasks during your degree or in extra-curricular activities such as university clubs and societies. The ability to solve problems and conflicts is always highly valued by recruiters.

Planning and research skills

To accomplish certain work tasks, you may need to develop a suitable strategy and plan of action. This could involve seeking out relevant information from various sources. How you analyse, interpret and report these findings is what's important here.

Highlight the relevant skills you've developed during your degree - reading around a subject and analysing that information before writing an essay, for instance, or interpreting the results of a scientific experiment.

Adaptability

Organisations want to stay competitive, so it's essential to show employers that you're able to adapt to new situations and learn new skills in the workplace. Possessing this skill also tells employers that you're a good leader who handles challenges well.

To evidence this in your application, you could provide examples of a time you've learned new skills or processes at university, or an instance when you've adapted to a new or challenging situation in your part-time job.

What are hard skills?

Hard skills are specific, teachable abilities or knowledge that are often measurable and job-specific. They are typically gained through education, training, or hands-on experience and are often required to perform a particular job effectively.

You’ll list hard skills on your CV and they are often tested in job interviews or through assessments.

Some examples of hard skills include:

Excel

You'll need to demonstrate your advanced spreadsheet skills. To demonstrate it to an employer, you could share a project where you analysed or visualised data using Excel, or bring a portfolio sample or case study with charts, formulas, and dashboards.

Programming

Employers will want to see evidence of programming languages such as Python or JavaScript. You could share a GitHub link to your code or completed projects on your CV.

Then in an interview, explain a technical challenge you solved and how your code performed.

Take a look at IT courses.

Foreign language fluency

An ability to speak, read, write, and understand a language other than your native one is a huge benefit for some roles. You should indicate your proficiency level on your CV andmention situations at interview where your language skills helped in a work or cultural context.

Graphic design

You should provide a link to an online portfolio demonstrating your work. You need to be prepared to show before-and-after examples of design work and explain your creative process.

Read about graphic design courses.

Data analysis

In your application link to any visualisations or dashboards and also bring them to interviews. Make sure you explain the effect of your work by describing a specific analysis you performed and the impact it had. For example, you could mention an improved marketing return on investment of 15% through customer segmentation.

Find out more

• Explore the skills you'll gain on your course at what can I do with my degree?