Want your job application to stand out? Employers say they look for these six skills

To distinguish your job application, employers highlight six crucial skills they seek.

Lynn Bassett, HR director at Barbour, values employees who can cultivate positive team relationships.

Employers are increasingly looking for candidates who demonstrate strong communication, collaboration, and problem-solving abilities. A significant five-year study by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) identified six key transferable skills that will be as vital as formal qualifications for securing and maintaining employment in the next decade.

This research comes as NFER's findings, published last year, suggest that job searching may become more challenging. AI and automation could lead to the disappearance of up to three million low- to mid-level jobs by 2035.

With over a million young people currently not engaged in education, employment, or training—the highest level in over a decade—we've been speaking with businesses about how individuals can showcase the essential skills employers are seeking.

Christian Townsley, co-founder of the North Bar group, emphasizes the importance of maintaining a "cool head" during trial shifts.

A significant adjustment for many transitioning from education to the workforce is the sudden absence of rigid structure. Consequently, many employers consider the ability to prioritize one's own work as indispensable. In Leeds, Christian Townsley, co-founder of the North Bar group, explains that working in a bustling bar demands composure and a "cool head."

"It's important that you can organise, you can multitask, you can identify who's next at the bar and remember that," he states.

Townsley incorporates trial shifts into the recruitment process, providing job seekers with an opportunity to demonstrate these skills in a practical setting. "We'll observe them working with customers, working with the team, seeing how they fit in, seeing how they communicate," he explains.

As employees advance, they are expected to assume greater responsibilities and manage them effectively within their roles. "There's organisation, ordering beer, pricing beer, planning social media, marketing, recruiting," Townsley adds.

Many employers desire new hires who can respond to issues as they emerge and take decisive action.

Maria Aderonmu transitioned from a political science degree to a career at Morgan Sindall Infrastructure, a company that executes infrastructure projects across various sectors including energy, defense, and rail in the UK. Now working in strategy, Aderonmu frequently needs to think spontaneously and notes that "adapting to each kind of situation" has been one of her most significant professional learnings. Her involvement in the debating society at university, she now realizes, prepared her for quick thinking.

Maria, who works in the construction industry, credits her time in the university debating society with preparing her for quick, on-the-spot thinking.

India Chaplin, People Director, acknowledges that she doesn't expect "every young person to have come across every scenario." Her advice is to consider how problem-solving experiences outside of work—such as in school or as part of a team—could be applied to a professional environment.

"There's lots of different ways that people can show the softer skills that we're looking for and how they would approach a problem, even if it was a scenario they've maybe not come across to help think how they would put that into practice in the working environment."

Jake Readman, General Manager at North Bar, stresses that "developing communication skills" is vital in a busy bar setting. He also highlights the importance of learning "how to de-escalate and resolve conflict in certain situations."

"Be confident in who you are as a person and your ability to learn new skills and rise to new situations," he added, "and also the ability to show a little bit of initiative."

El Cousins prefers to deliver her CV in person, believing it allows employers to "get an idea of your personality."

As we spoke with Readman, El Cousins entered North Bar to submit her CV. She explained her preference for meeting potential employers face-to-face because "they get an idea of your personality." "I think that matters quite a lot and that doesn't always come across on a piece of paper or online," Cousins told us. Readman was impressed by Cousins and later offered her some shifts.

At Barbour's factory in South Shields, HR director Lynn Bassett states that the ability to collaborate is a quality they seek in all recruits. "Each department is interlinked with one another so working as one team is really important," she says. Bassett explains that when hiring, they look for how individuals can articulate their own experiences of collaboration. "They might not have the specific experience that's needed for the role, but we look more at those transferable skills."

Addie Pattas, currently on a placement with Barbour during her fashion degree, emphasizes the crucial role of teamwork.

This has become evident to Addie Pattas since she began a placement with Barbour as part of her fashion university degree. She works with the factory division responsible for repairing old jackets sent in by customers. Pattas notes that keeping everyone informed throughout the process is a significant aspect of the work, involving "communicating with not only the warehouse but also the factory and the shipping team."

While industries like fashion are overtly creative, the capacity for innovative thinking and problem-solving is not limited to a single type of work. At Barbour, Bassett explains that creativity manifests in various forms, which they aim to uncover through interview questions.

"We'll ask questions that are quite generic around give us an example of when something's not gone to plan and how did you get it back on track," she says, highlighting how creative approaches to problems often yield the best solutions.

India Chaplin, People Director at a construction company, states that employees must be capable of evaluating data.

In an era dominated by AI, large corporations require individuals who can comprehend and oversee their data management. A crucial component of this is applying human judgment to determine reliability and credibility, which underscores the importance of information literacy as a higher-level skill.

India Chaplin, People Director at Morgan Sindall Infrastructure, explains that raw data alone doesn't "tell a story." "We need to pull that together, we need to think about why it's important, what it's telling us." For their business, this means being able to analyze data, such as weather forecasts for engineers working on power lines, and identify what is significant to share with other teams.

Jude Hillary, the economist who spearheaded the NFER project, asserts that these human skills will enable individuals to secure and retain higher-skilled employment, even as automation advances. "This is where the job growth is going to be in the labour market," he says. "It's really important young people come into the labour market being able to compete for these jobs."

He believes that focusing on these six essential employment skills will help young people adapt during a period of significant change. "It's increasingly likely that during the course of your working life, you might have to make some fairly dramatic changes in what you're doing as your job gets replaced by technology."

An independent review, led by former health secretary Alan Milburn, has been examining the extent of young people not in work, education, or training. The interim report indicated that 42% of employers cited a lack of soft skills or work readiness as a challenge when hiring young people. Only 10% mentioned the resilience of young people, which was the next most significant concern.

There is growing pressure on schools, colleges, and universities to prioritize equipping young people with the necessary skills for the workplace, alongside academic learning. Already, Prime Minister Andy Burnham has indicated that more teenagers should begin technical education at 14 and has endorsed a work experience scheme for 10,000 young people, announced this week by the retail chain Sainsbury's.

In September, the final report of the Milburn review is anticipated to present its proposals on how to facilitate more young adults into secure employment.

Additional reporting by Hannah Karpel.