What are hard skills for students?

If you’ve been looking at applications, whether academic or for a job, you may have seen that they often require you to talk about your skills. The term “skills” in itself is incredibly broad, but there are two subcategories that we can break this down into: soft skills and hard skills.

In this article, we’ll be focusing on the latter, hard skills. This is especially as these skills aren’t quite talked about as much as soft skills are, particularly in reference to students and young people creating their CVs and other applications.

In short, hard skills are a subcategory of skills. These types of skills are the specific capabilities that you need to have in order to be able to complete a certain role. These will generally be measurable and provable through some kind of qualification or experience. An example of a hard skill is computer coding.

Continue reading to get greater insight into what hard skills really are. This article won’t just take you through its definition but also give you relevant examples of ones you may have yourself and even talk you through developing them.

Table of Contents

What are hard skills?

As we’ve already established, hard skills are a subcategory of skills that you might put on your CV or some kind of job or academic application. Now we’re going to go further into what this actually means.

Very simply, hard skills refer to the specific skills and capabilities that one might have and will need in order to fulfil a certain role. These hard skills will often be technical and can be proven and even measured.

This is due to the fact that hard skills are entirely learnable. Since they are developed due to knowledge, training or some kind of experience in a specific area.

For example, hard skills for a chef may be food safety and food handling as well as specific cooking techniques or styles. We’ll look at more examples of hard skills, particularly in reference to students, later on in the article.

You can learn more about hard skills in this article by Indeed.

Hard skills vs soft skills

While we’re focusing on hard skills in this article, we still need to look into soft skills so that you can properly distinguish these two categories. The first step to comparing them is to look at what soft skills actually are.

Soft skills are the characteristics and interpersonal skills that allow people to succeed within a workplace environment. These skills are not specific to any job or role and are generally not teachable.

You may also see soft skills being referred to as transferable skills or even as employability skills. You can learn more about this by checking out this page from the National Careers Service.

Some examples of soft skills include team work, problem solving, time management, leadership and communication. You can learn more about soft skills in this Think Student article.

As we can see from the definition of soft skills, soft skills are virtually the opposite of hard skills, in several ways. First of all, soft skills are general and can apply to a vast range of different roles, unlike hard skills which are specific to certain roles.

Also, soft skills are also called transferable skills as they can be gained and developed through experience and exposure. Comparing this to hard skills which will often need to be learnt directly either from training, education or on-the-job experience.

What are the best hard skills for students?

Deciding which hard skills are best for you will depend on what kinds of jobs you’re interested in. In this article, we’ll be looking at it from a more general perspective for all students for both part-time jobs that you might apply for while studying and full-time jobs that you might apply for once your studies have finished.

In the following sections we’ll break down the best skills for students to be developing while studying in order to get part-time jobs alongside their studies. As well as to help you get full-time jobs once these studies have finished.

Which hard skills should you include on your CV for a part-time job?

First of all, let’s look at the hard skills you may need for a part-time job while you are studying.

For students, most part-time jobs will be in the retail or hospitality sectors. Although students may also work in babysitting, tutoring or online.

For retail, hard skills include:

Mathematic skills and money handling
Customer service
Retail technology experience
Food preparation and management
Sales skills

You can learn more about these skills by checking out this article by Shopify.

For hospitality, hard skills include:

Food preparation and management
Food safety
Allergens knowledge
Mathematic skills and money handling
Customer service
Sales skills

For more on these hospitality skills, you can look at this article by Indeed.

For tutoring, hard skills include:

Curriculum knowledge
Lesson planning
Teaching skills
Classroom management (if teaching more than one student)
Language skills (if teaching a language)

You can learn more about these skills in this article by Explore Learning.

For babysitting, hard skills include:

Childcare experience
Health and safety skills, such as CPR
Cooking
Subject knowledge or specific creative skills

You can learn more about these skills here on the American Red Cross website.

Which hard skills should you develop as a student for the future?

There are a wide range of jobs that students can get after finishing their studies. Due to this, we’re not going to look at any roles specifically.

Instead, we’ll be looking at the main kinds of hard skills that students and recent graduates can develop independently to help in finding a permanent job when finishing your studies.

First of all, there are hard communication skills. These can directly relate to students and can easily be developed alongside your studies or in extracurricular actives, such as a school newsletter/ university newspaper or simply running your own blog.

The best of these skills for students to develop are as follows:

Blog writing
Article writing
Copywriting
Content writing
Editing and proofreading
Research and reporting
Transcription
Multilingualism

Particularly when thinking about the future and the ever-increasing use of technology, other skills that are very important for students to learn are digital skills. These include a wide variety of different skills and can be learnt in many different ways.

The best of these for students to learn are as follows:

Microsoft 365 Suite (Word, PowerPoint, Teams, Excel, OneDrive, OneNote, etc.)
Google Workspace (Docs, Slides, Sheets, Meet, Drive, etc.)
Coding and programming languages
Website development and design
Social media management
Search engine optimisation (SEO)

You can learn more about all of these different hard skills by checking out this article by The Muse.

How to develop hard skills as a student

Developing hard skills is not just about learning the skill itself. It’s also about practising and actively using it as well as being able to show a potential employer or some other kind of recruiter that you have these capabilities.

In the following sections, we’ll be exploring some of the ways that you can follow all these steps to developing your hard skills specifically as a student. Please note that the following ways are partially based on information from this article on the LinkedIn website.

1. Formal education

If you’re already a student, this is hands down the easiest way to acquire hard skills as you’re already doing it. As a student, whether you’re in university, college or even in secondary school, you are receiving some kind of formal education.

This formal education will be giving you knowledge and experience in certain subject areas. How relevant it is and if you will actually be able to use your current studies as a way of acquiring hard skills will depend on what you’re studying as well as what you’re applying for.

For example, if you study Medicine at university, this degree will give you the hard skills and qualifications needed in order to become a doctor, although you will still need to do some further training. This can also apply to other degree subjects and career paths, especially ones like Nursing and Law, and can still apply to lower-level qualifications.

To learn more about qualifying as a doctor in the UK, have a look at this Think Student article.

2. Do online courses

The easiest way to gain hard skills that aren’t related to your formal education is to do online courses. These are often known as MOOCs (massive open online courses).

There are so many different courses out there in things like digital marketing, coding, writing, languages, entrepreneurship and so much more. These courses will generally be free and depending on the platform you may even be able to get a certificate, although you may have to pay for this.

These online courses can teach you all you need to know about a specific subject so that you can gain and use these hard skills when you start working.

These MOOCs are available on a wide range of different platforms. Some will be better than others so it might be better to stick to the more well-known sites.

Look at the following list for examples of platforms that offer free online courses:

You can see a list of other MOOC providers by checking out this article by Class Central.

3. Learn from YouTube videos

The internet and technology in general are constantly growing in its uses and helpfulness. Nowadays, you can be scrolling through your phone and watching a YouTube video that is actually educational.

There are so many YouTube channels where you can learn a whole a range of different skills. Some of these will be formed a slightly more official courses, while others might just be videos that give you tips on the subject.

Either way, you can use YouTube and other apps and websites like it or with a more educational slant, to learn many different hard skills. Many different skills can be learnt through YouTube such as social media management, search engine optimisation (SEO), copywriting, coding, web development and design, graphic design and many more.

Some of these channels are as follows:

You can find more examples of YouTube channels to learn skills from in this article from LinkedIn, this article from Course Joiner as well as this article by Shushant Lakhyani on Medium.

4. Do volunteering

Now that you’ve learnt the skills, you need to put them into practice. This is both to develop these skills further but also so that you have proof of using them.

Volunteering is a great way for students to get work experience and it’s not limited to working in a charity shop or helping out at a food bank. There are many more ways of volunteering, particularly so that you can put these hard skills that you’ve learnt into practice.

The best voluntary role for you will depend on the skills that you’re learning. For example, if you want to practice your copywriting or social media management skills, you could offer to run the social media and/or website for a local business or organisation near you if it doesn’t already have someone doing it.

Alternatively, if you are developing hard skills for tutoring, such as lesson planning or teaching in general, you could offer to tutor younger students. This could be your own younger siblings, your friends’ younger siblings or other students at your school.

If you would like to look at other work experience or volunteering ideas to develop your hard skills, have a look at this Think Student article. You can also look at this Think Student article for more on the benefits of volunteering.