Quantifying your skill statements means describing how you have used your skills (transferable, personal, and content skills) using numbers, dollars, and percentages. Quantified skill statements can significantly impact the effectiveness of your resume and interviews, enabling you to illustrate in writing and verbally how you can meet the employer’s needs. Ultimately, this can result in more job offers. For example, let’s say that Kathy is interviewing for an office manager position. Part of her responsibilities would be to train new workers to use particular software programs. Which of the following statements would impress an employer more?

Typical statement: “Trained employees on various software programs.”

Quantified skill statement: “Trained two administrative assistants to use the more advanced features of Excel. Within one week, those trained improved their Excel skill level by 100 percent.”

Which of these statements will convince the employer that you would be an excellent person to hire? Of course, the second quantified skill statement is much more powerful in convincing the employer that the person can meet their needs and would be an excellent employee.

In this step, you can develop quantified skill statements for your ten to fifteen most relevant transferable skills for your job target. You can identify these transferable skills by analyzing the typical job requirements for your job target, which will guide you in identifying the needed transferable skills for your job target. To succeed in your job search, you must know which skills a prospective employer will seek. You can then observe which of your top transferable skills from your CFT Skills Map™ and CFT Matrix match the needed transferable skills.

As demonstrated above, try to quantify your skill statements with numbers, percentages, and dollars (#, %, $) whenever possible. Indicate the results you achieved in terms of dollars (amount sold, dollars saved, money raised, etc.) or percentages (amount increased or decreased) or numbers/amount (number of clients, students, programs, etc.). If you are unsure of exact figures, you can estimate the results and use terms like “approximately” or “more than.”

The only reason that employers hire you is because of the results that you can produce. When employers read about your results, they can better picture how you could produce similar results.

While you always want to ask yourself what the results of using each transferable skill were, typically, you can only quantify some of your skill statements. There will be many skill statements that you can’t quantify. You can sometimes describe a result in more general terms for those skill statements. For example, an aspiring accountant wrote a skill statement from her internship: “Created and executed financial policies and procedures to ensure accurate financial reporting while consistently meeting deadlines.” While this statement is not quantified with numbers, percentages, or dollar figures, it does describe a result of accurate financial reporting while meeting deadlines.”

More Examples of Quantified Skill Statements

Job Target: Graphic Designer. Skill: Design/Create

Example 1: Created promotional brochure for a non-profit special event attended by 500 people. The event raised more than $100,000.

Example 2: Designed a 120-page training manual for the sales department using Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator. Received feedback that the materials were practical and visually appealing.

Job Target: Commercial copier repair technician. Skill: Repair/Service

Example 1: Repaired more than 15 different types of copier and multi-function machines successfully.

Example 2: Reduced the cost of repairing office machines by approximately 20% by accurately determining which parts needed to be refurbished instead of replaced with new parts.

Your quantified skill statements are vital to developing your “big six” marketing tools: Targeted Resume, LinkedIn Profile, Strength Summary, Targeted Cover Letter, Personal Contact Letter, and Direct Employer Contact Letter. We suggest you start with your Targeted Resume, as the work you put into developing a great resume can be used in all the other marketing tools.

Summary

Developing quantified skills statements is a building block for an effective resume. You can also use them in your Strengths Summary, cover letters, LinkedIn profile, and interviews as you describe how you can meet the employer’s needs. Writing quantified skill statements takes time but can result in employers choosing you over other candidates.

Next Steps

Next, you can develop the first of the “big six” job search marketing tools – a targeted resume. Your quantified skill statements are a key building block for building a resume that produces interviews.