When employers are looking to hire, what sort of things do they look for on candidate’s CV? Your instinctive answer to this might be things like impressive, high-level qualifications and fancy job titles. But while the education, training and career history sections of your CV are important to them, so too are skills that are common to pretty much all walks of life. Things like motivation, reliability and teamwork.

In some roles and at some workplaces, employers value these skills above more formal qualifications. Most bosses have a story to tell about someone who had great formal credentials on paper, but who turned out to be utterly useless once they were hired. When this happened, it tends to be due to a lack of these transferable skills.

Words like teamwork and leadership are therefore not just things you should pay lip service to, therefore. These things are worth cultivating, as in addition to helping you get a job they’ll allow you to excel in it.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be examining some of these skills in detail on our blog, so that you can get a better idea of what they involve. And in knowing this, you’ll both be able to describe better on your CV the things you’ve done that relate to teamwork and know how to work on these areas in the future. The first skill on our list is teamwork.

Teamwork is one of the most important skills at all. Almost no employee works in isolation; their success depends on their ability to work well with their colleagues. But what does it actually involve?

In our view, the key elements of teamwork are these:

Being able to what other members of your team have to say.

Keeping members of your team motivated as you complete a task.

Understanding the different personalities, strengths and weaknesses of the people you work with.

Not dominating or bossing about the group…

…while also being able to take charge in a group that seems to lack a leader.

Taking equal responsibility for problems and failures, and not trying to claim individual glory for successes.