Have you ever applied for a remote job and noted it said something like, “remote work proficiency,” or “previous experience working remotely preferred,” or similar, and it left you scratching your head wondering what exactly the hiring manager was looking for?

Well if you’re in doubt, it simply means that they want candidates who are not only looking for remote work because of the benefits it can provide them, but the company wants candidates who genuinely thrive in remote work environments and can deliver their best work and collaborate meaningfully with their co-workers around the world (or across the country). To improve your chances of landing a remote job, you need to have the right mix of skills—technical and non-technical—to stand out in a competitive job market that is clamoring for remote work.

13 Skills To Include In Your Resume For 2025

Let’s take a look at the top 13 skills that help your resume shine and demonstrate your capability for delivering high performance in a remote work setting:

1. Communication Skills

We already know that communication skills are pivotal to an organization’s success. But this impact is more keenly felt when said organization is operating remotely or on a hybrid-remote basis. Lack of clear, transparent, timely, and respectful communication using the right channels can be detrimental to a new project’s success, for example.

2. Time Management

Do you have a method that you swear by that helps you to prioritize and manage tasks and deadlines and maintain productivity without being under direct supervision in the office? If you’ve found some effective techniques for project-managing your own work and schedule, be sure to reference it. This might even arise as a question in your job interview, so be prepared.

3. Digital Collaboration Tools

Digital collaboration tools such as Google Workspace, Teams and Microsoft Office, and Slack are good examples that you can use to show proficiency and experience in remote work. And if you’re not familiar with these yet, undertake a crash course and play around with the different features until you’re comfortable.

4. Focus

Now this is a really hard one for many professionals, even in the office, where we’re accustomed to checking our phones or chatting every few minutes. But the temptation to lose focus intensifies when working from home as there are so many things that you can do during work time. The key is to find balance.

While doing the laundry in between meetings might be innocent, endlessly browsing social media when in a meeting with your camera off, while relying on AI to fill you in on anything you’ve missed, is clearly not demonstrating engagement.

Once you’ve set your mind to engage in a task, give it your 100%. Anything less than this slows down your growth and productivity, and it can even cause you to lose out on key career-building opportunities.

5. Problem-Solving Skills

As a remote worker, you’ll often encounter difficulties and emergencies that require you to think and act on your feet to ensure the most effective and quickest possible solution. For example, what would you do in basic scenarios such as time zone conflicts, technical issues impeding your work, issues arising from a project you’re collaborating on, or conflicts and misunderstandings with stakeholders? Do you have what it takes to get to the root cause and tackle the problem creatively?

Some other remote work skills worth the mention in your resume include:

1. Adaptability
2. Tech savviness
3. Emotional intelligence
4. Writing skills (for emails, chats, and reports)
5. Project management skills
6. Leadership skills and mentoring (if you can demonstrate how you have been proactive in displaying leadership qualities and mentoring your team members in your last remote role, this is a huge bonus)
7. Data literacy
8. Customer-centric skills and focus

Now that you know what skills are best to include for your applications for remote jobs, the question is, how do you include them? Do you list all or some of them? The best approach is to mention a few (especially your tech skills and proficiency in virtual collaboration tools) in your skills section of the resume, and scatter examples that demonstrate how you have displayed these traits, all throughout your resume.

For example, listing your non-mandatory certifications that you undertook while at work, or how you adapted to feedback and improved output by a certain percentage, demonstrates a growth mindset and points to emotional intelligence skills. You’ve got to think creatively, and intersperse these remote job skills as keywords throughout the document, while providing tangible examples.

Your remote job is ready for you in 2025. So what are you doing to demonstrate that you’re competent for it?