Essential Organisational Skills for the Workplace

Being disorganised in the workplace doesn’t just result in substandard performance – it can also negatively impact employee motivation and increase stress. This is why employers seek candidates with a track record of strong organisational skills.

Organisational skills enable employees to effectively and efficiently manage their time and resources. Regardless of your profession, most jobs expect employees to have good organisational skills. It’s therefore important to highlight your organisational skills on your CV and showcase them throughout your job interview to impress potential employers.

Below we’ll cover important organisational skills, how to showcase them on your CV and how to focus on them in a job interview.

Organisational skills help you manage your time and resources effectively and efficiently. Organised people use these skills to improve their workflow and stay focused on different tasks. They use it to be more productive, excel at their job duties, and reach their goals with less stress.

Below are the top five organisational skills for the workplace that employers value.

1. Records management 

To perform your job duties effectively, a neatly organised workplace is a must, and a big part of keeping an organised workplace is physical organisation when it comes to data, records and other key information. Records management involves organising any business-related content and documents. This requires maintaining an orderly workspace free of clutter and also systemizing the organisation of documents for easy access. Diligence and self-motivation are key to keeping a tidy workplace, meaning you should always return items where they belong once you’re finished with them. You should also make a habit of keeping all work-related physical items organised.

2. Digital organisation

Because most of today’s jobs involve working on computers, having a digital organisation has become a key component of your overall organization. Organising our digital workplace helps us save valuable time that can boost productivity and goal setting, so we don’t waste time frantically searching for important files and emails. Organising our digital workplaces involves strategic planning to properly label and store all work-essential files to make them easy to access. It also consists of arranging frequently used computer applications for quick and easy access and bookmarking links you visit often. Digital organisation involves prioritising what items are of the highest importance. It also involves decision-making to decide where and how they will be stored, as well as setting aside time each day to organize your digital workplace and making a habit of routinely backing up all important files.

3. Planning

Planning is important to schedule work-related processes and maintain productivity and performance in the workplace in the long and short term. Moreover, it’s a skill set that allows you to effectively prepare for and tackle big projects by developing a plan of action. Using an action plan means breaking down a project into smaller manageable tasks. This is great for multitasking. However, effective planning also requires problem-solving to figure out how to streamline processes, complete each particular task, and figure out the resources each task will need. Planning skills allow you to create a project roadmap that provides clear instructions for each task. This requires good communication skills so that miscommunication doesn’t happen. You need to provide clear directions for everyone involved to complete the project as efficiently as possible. People with excellent planning skills usually utilise reverse engineering, by first understanding the end goal of whatever project they take on. They then work backward to conceptualise all the possible steps needed to accomplish the project. They then organise all the possible steps into tasks and delegate the tasks accordingly, setting timelines and deadlines for each one.

4. Time management 

In contrast to planning, which involves effectively creating a roadmap of tasks, time management skills involve effectively scheduling your time efficiently to carry out your plans. Utilising proper time management enables you to prioritize tasks and projects to deliver the most impact and value. Also, having a defined action plan with set deadlines contributes to less procrastination.

5. Project management

You could say that project management skills combine all of the above skills, as they’re all needed to carry out a project from start to finish. As projects become increasingly more dynamic and complex, utilising effective project management skills is critical, as they help you organize and manage projects with both the big picture and intricate details in mind.

To get more interviews and land the perfect job, highlighting your organisation skills is vital. On your CV, weave them into your past work experience descriptions. You should give your organisational skills some context with specific examples where your organisational skills achieved results. Here’s a great example of how you can highlight your organisational skills in your past work experience:

As the Project Manager at Company X, I successfully handled the company’s most vital projects for four years. I managed a team of five and effectively delegated project tasks that matched each team member’s unique skills and competencies in order to meet project deadlines and stay under budget. Productivity increased between 15-25% for each consecutive year and project costs were reduced between 30-40% each year.

During a job interview, share specific stories from previous jobs that highlight your organisational skills when answering interview questions. Explain the typical systems and processes you utilize to best manage your time, and plan and handle multiple tasks and projects. 

For more help updating your CV with these and other key professional skills, use our CV builder.