Visual Designer 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 Visual Designer position? Of course continuing to gain experience working as a Visual Designer 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 Visual Designer 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 Digital as the most prominent terms in their Visual Designer job descriptions, yet those who have held the position of Visual Designer 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 Visual Designer 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 Visual Designer or to advance your career into beyond this role.

Employers require a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Visual Designer positions. The top three keywords make up 39.12% of the total set of top terms. Look to the Resume Checklist below to see how Collaboration, Digital, and Illustration Design shares stack up against the share from resumes. Graphic Design, Innovation and User Experience represent an additionally healthy share of the employer Visual Designer job postings with their combined total of 31.22%. At 29.67%, Adobe Photoshop, Typography, Communication Skills, and Detail Oriented appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Visual Designer skills and requirements according to employers.

Job seeker resumes showcase a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Visual Designer positions. The top three keywords represent 37.86% of the total set of top resume listed keywords. Look to the Resume Checklist below to investigate how Graphic Design, Adobe Photoshop, and Illustration Design match up to employer job descriptions. Adobe InDesign, Collaboration, and Innovation represent a very decent share of skills found on resumes for Visual Designer with 30.08% of the total. At 32.06%, User Experience, User Interface Design, MS Office, and Social Media appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Visual Designer skills and qualifications found on resumes.

Here is a simple table of the top 10 skills and qualifications as listed by employers in Visual Designer job postings since January of 2018, followed by the top 10 skills and qualifications most commonly listed by people who held the title of Visual Designer 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 Visual Designer roles. 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 Visual Designer 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 often list Detail Oriented or Technical as requirements in Visual Designer job descriptions; however, job seekers 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 Visual Designer role may help you stand out more to hiring managers.

Both employer job listings and resumes from people who’ve held the role of Visual Designer tend to always include skills and requirements found in this list. Whether you’ve only got Digital, Communication Skills, Collaboration, Typography, Innovation, Interaction Design, User Experience, Iconography, Translation, Adobe Creative Suite, Illustration Design, Prototype Design, Graphic Design, Adobe Products, User Interface Design, Adobe Photoshop, HTML or After Effects Design in your background and experience, make sure to highlight the term prominently on your resume. As a job seeker 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 Visual Designer.

Employer job listings seldom list Adobe InDesign, Photography, Social Media, Marketing Collateral or UX Design as important skills or qualifications in Visual Designer job descriptions. Nevertheless, job seekers 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 Visual Designer role 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 Visual Designer. Get started on your journey with a new ZipRecruiter Profile today!