Design Director Must-Have Resume Skills and Keywords

Are you interested in improving your job outlook and increasing your salary? How can you demonstrate that you are the most qualified candidate for a Design Director position? Of course continuing to gain experience working as a Design Director may be your best qualification, but there are other ways you can also develop your skills, like continuing education or volunteer opportunities. More immediately, however, you can be ready for your next opportunity or promotion by educating yourself about the duties, responsibilities, and required skills of a Design Director and making sure your resume reflects your experience properly.

In order to do so, you’ll want to know that employers commonly feature Collaboration and Innovation as the most prominent terms in their Design Director job descriptions, yet those who have held the position of Design Director and list it on their resume indicate Graphic Design and Adobe Photoshop more predominantly. Do you know what you would list?

We designed the ZipRecruiter Career Keyword Mapper to help you solve this problem and hopefully improve your resume. Using machine learning tools paired with industry research, our Marketplace Research Team helped analyze millions of job postings and resumes to identify the most important keywords related to Design Director jobs. Our goal is to help you discover opportunities to improve your resume or to help you understand what skills and qualifications you need to be a Design Director or to advance your career into beyond this role.

Employers require a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Design Director positions. The top three keywords make up 47% of the total set of top terms. Look to the Resume Checklist below to see how Collaboration, Innovation, and Digital shares stack up against the share from resumes. Mentoring, User Experience and Graphic Design represent an additionally healthy share of the employer Design Director job postings with their combined total of 28.03%. At 24.98%, Communication Skills, Technical, Illustration Design, and Creative Design appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Design Director skills and requirements according to employers.

Job seeker resumes showcase a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Design Director positions. The top three keywords represent 42.31% of the total set of top resume listed keywords. Look to the Resume Checklist below to investigate how Graphic Design, Adobe Photoshop, and Collaboration match up to employer job descriptions. Illustration Design, Digital, and Adobe InDesign represent a very decent share of skills found on resumes for Design Director with 27.88% of the total. At 29.79%, Project Management, MS Office, Innovation, and Fashion appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Design Director skills and qualifications found on resumes.

Here is a simple table of the top 10 skills and qualifications as listed by employers in Design Director job postings since January of 2018, followed by the top 10 skills and qualifications most commonly listed by people who held the title of Design Director on their resumes.

Our Resume Keyword Checklist is based upon an analysis of the most commonly found terms within both job descriptions and resumes for Design Director positions. Our algorithm helps isolate phrases and patterns to identify the most frequently recurring and reused keywords from each data source, while correcting for uncommon and outlier results. Various heuristic methodologies are then applied to ultimately create two top 20 lists of the most important and significant skills, certificates and requirements found within Design Director job postings and resumes. We then merge the two lists together and use a combination of statistics and rules-based scenarios to create a list that is audited by the Marketplace Research team, and finally turned into the checklist you see below. Our hope is that knowing this information can help you make your best impression with your next potential employer.

Employer job listings tend to list Communication Skills or Mentoring as requirements in Design Director job descriptions; however, candidates mention them far less frequently on their resumes. If you possess any or all of these experiences, including these keywords prominently on your resume when applying for a Design Director position may help you stand out more to hiring managers.

Both employer job listings and resumes from people who’ve held the position of Design Director tend to always include skills and requirements found in this list. Whether you’ve only got Detail Oriented, Innovation, Auto Delivery, Typography, User Experience, Collaboration, User Interface Design, Digital, Prototype Design, Technical, Creative Design, Product Design, Adobe Creative Suite or Adobe Products in your background and experience, make sure to highlight the term prominently on your resume. As a candidate you’ll be competing with many others who are bound to have as many as you (or more!) of these common resume keywords highlighted in their application for a job as a Design Director.

Employer job listings infrequently list Project Management, Illustration Design, Graphic Design, Adobe InDesign, Photography, Social Media, Adobe Photoshop, Marketing Collateral, Vendor Management, MS Office or Fashion as important skills or qualifications in Design Director job descriptions. Nevertheless, candidates mention them much more commonly in their resumes. If you possess any or all of these experiences, including these keywords prominently on your resume when applying for a Design Director position may go unnoticed or even discounted by hiring managers.

At ZipRecruiter, we understand better than anyone the importance of using the right keywords to describe your experience — it’s crucial to attracting the right employers! We built our business on the ability to effectively match job seekers with employers using AI-technology that understands your resume and how likely you are to be noticed by a potential future employer. Having a ZipRecruiter profile that showcases your most relevant skills and abilities can help you get recruited into a new role as a Design Director. Get started on your journey with a new ZipRecruiter Profile today!