When last we interfaced, I was writing a series about how to have a great resume without lying. With so many people hunting for jobs, I thought I’d revisit that before continuing on my daily thoughts about working on the web.

One of the best things I did when I worked for other people was to up my skills – that was always the deal-breaker, not my educational background, and it was also the key to actually GETTING to the interview. Whether or not the employer liked me was only enough to get to the next round of interviews.

It always boiled down to, can you do the job? This is probably more true now than it was in 2004 when I had last worked for a company I didn’t own.

When I was a Human Resources assistant, I learned a lot about how employers search resumes, particularly Monster.com. It had a lot to do with keyword searches. Applying what I knew then to what I know now regarding how people search (since that’s part of what I do for a living now), I realized that it has a LOT to do with displaying the right skills.

So if you’re looking for a job now, write down a list of every single computer program you know how to use. I mean ALL of them, Internet Explorer, even. Outlook. Every last one.

Then look in the help files and look to see how many things on that list you can do. Add that to the skills part of your resume in Monster.

Yes, even “create a new document.” This may seem like busy work now, but do it for the program you know the best, then measure the results in the difference between how many people looked at your resume today, and how many did yesterday.

If you’re a techie, be sure to add the word “troubleshoot” and the name of a program as a skill, even if you’re not going out for a Help Desk type of job. Companies that are looking to save money on new IT employees, unfair as it may be, are trying to hire employees that can look over and help their neighbors.

Now, what if you don’t have any Office Skills, for example, and you’re trying to get an Office job?

There are three places I’d go to learn Office Skills for free. We’ll talk about that in the next article.