Organisational skills: definition and examples

Need to see some examples of organisation skills? Or looking at how to improve your organisational habits? In this article, we will cover all you need to know about organisational skills, plus how to include them in your CV when you are job hunting.

Whether you're working, studying or doing your hobbies, it's important to be organised. Employers love to see applications from people with great organisation skills since this helps them meet deadlines, do their tasks and minimise stress. Let's look at what exactly these skills are.

• What are organisational skills?
• Examples of organisational skills
• Why are organisational skills important?
• How to improve organisational skills
• How to include organisational skills in a CV
• To sum up

What are organisational skills?

Organisational skills are all the ways that you keep yourself on top of your workload, including meeting deadlines, planning out projects and workflow, and getting to work on time. Being organised is important in any workplace as you'll use your time and available resources more efficiently to get your job done. This is vital in almost any job role, but especially roles like healthcare, law, accounting, client-facing roles, and more.

Being organised is considered a soft skill. This means that they are harder to quantify, but they are just as valuable as hard skills. In fact, there are plenty of soft skills employers value as much as hard skills. Having good organisation is also one of the many transferable skills that can be useful in any field.

Examples of organisational skills

So, what skills should you focus on to develop your organisational abilities? Here is our top list of organisational skills examples that employers love to see on people's CVs.

Time management skills

Time management means planning out your daily and weekly schedule so that all your tasks have an allocated time. This is usually done with planning and timetabling. You also need to include flexibility, though, to ensure that unexpected issues or changes don't completely derail you. You'll also need to think critically about the tasks and figure out which ones are more urgent or which can be completed first. This is especially important in jobs where you would be handling multiple projects at once.

Decision-making skills

Making good decisions about how and when to complete tasks is important to stay organised. This helps make sure that you complete everything in time and that you are better able to keep up with potential changes to your schedule. This is useful in any role where you will be managing a project or where you are expected to work without supervision, as it speeds up your workflow, rather than needing help to make decisions about what to do next.

Communication skills

Communication is vital to ensure that a whole team knows how everyone is progressing with their tasks, which helps everyone stay organised. This also means sharing and receiving information accurately and quickly with co-workers and clients to help avoid any issues that could slow down the progress of the project. This is important in pretty much every job where you could end up working with others.

Strategic thinking

Being able to think strategically will help you with organisation since it requires considering the best way to implement the tasks you are planning. For example, if you were working out the best route for delivery, you need to make sure to deliver in a way that makes the most of your time, rather than driving back and forth. In the same way, you can use strategic thinking for other job types, where you want to make sure that tasks are completed in the right order to give you information and building blocks needed for later tasks.

Self-motivation

Self-motivation is a vital organisational skill because, without it, nothing gets done quickly. Once you have planned your time you need to push through and have the drive to get things done in order to keep on schedule. Whether this means rewarding yourself or feeling motivated by helping your company, the result is the same. Companies are always looking for workers who are self-motivated and stay on top of their tasks.

Delegation

Part of being organised is knowing what you can do and what you can't. Whether you are working as part of a team or whether you are leading a team, you need to know what tasks you can't complete and make sure that the right person is handling those tasks to ensure the smooth running of the project. This includes skills like communication, analytical thinking and conflict resolution.

Planning

Planning is at the heart of organisational skills. This includes planning logistics or making sure that everything can be handled in the right timeframe. This includes skills such as note-taking, critical thinking, prioritising and a good awareness of your own strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you know you are weaker in a certain area, you will need to plan to give yourself more time to complete those tasks.

Prioritising

Prioritising is looking at what tasks are most important and which have to be handled first. There are lots of ways of prioritising tasks. One of the most important is to look at which are most urgent. It is also important to consider which tasks can only be handled after other tasks. You also need good flexibility and adaptability for this, since it is very common to have new priorities pop up, which you will need to fit into your plan somehow. This is especially important in jobs where you will have to handle a lot of different projects, like working for an agency with lots of clients.

Physical organisation

It can be very hard to be on top of your organisational skills if you do not have the physical organisation to back them up. It is important to make sure that your filing and systems of organising documents are up to scratch. You will want to make sure that your system is not too complex, as you do not want it to take too long to look through, but you also don't want a system that is too simple. This includes a lot of admin tasks including filing and computer use.

Attention to detail

Being able to look at tasks in detail means that you can better assess what needs to be done. It also helps you know where to put things in your filing system and timetable. This is important in every job role, as the more you know about what you are doing, the better. It can also help you avoid nasty surprises from missing something important in a document.

More organisational skills

There are plenty of ways to stay organised. Here are some extra organisational skills to think about working on:

1. Critical thinking
2. Note-taking
3. Strategic thinking
4. Adaptability
5. Mental organisation
6. Collaboration
7. Organisation software
8. Self-management
9. Goal setting
10. Project management

Why are organisational skills important?

Organisation skills are vital whatever you are doing, whether you're a student, a worker, or you're doing a personal project. Having good organisation skills will help you plan your projects ahead of time, keep track of progress and be more likely to succeed. This can be applied to anything. 

If you are studying, it's helpful to have a plan for how and when to complete parts of your assignment. In the workplace, it's a good idea to have all your paperwork neatly filed for you to refer back to. This helps promote efficiency and avoids wasting time or resources.

How to improve organisational skills

Looking to improve your organisational skills to help with job hunting or to handle your own projects better? Here are our top suggestions for how to work on building these skills:

1. Make lists - Lists are a great way to approach organising. You can easily write lists of tasks you have to do, sub-tasks, meetings, etc. This lets you quickly and easily see all the things you have to deal with and it can help you group tasks into relevant sets.
2. Pick the most important tasks - Once you have all your tasks laid out in front of you, you need to learn to prioritise and pick the most important parts first. This means looking at which tasks you can complete before others (since some will rely on other things being completed first) and which are most important. If you want to practice this outside work, you could start prioritising your housework tasks.
3. Timetable - You should be able to have a rough idea of how long a task will take. This means that you can timetable what you will work on and when. The big advantage of this is that it shows you how much you have to do, and you will never start the day being unsure of what work holds for you.
4. Set goals - If you don't have goals or deadlines, there's no incentive to actually get tasks finished. Setting yourself goals can really help give you an endpoint for each task, which in turn will help you stay more organised. This also gives you plenty of chances to stop and assess what went well or what went badly.
5. Hold yourself accountable - If you fail to complete a task in time, be sure to hold yourself accountable and acknowledge the failure. Then, try to figure out why you failed — was the task too big for the time you allowed? Or were you not focused enough? Whatever it was, work to remedy it next time.
6. Reward success - It is just as important to acknowledge when you succeed. this will help keep you motivated next time. You can also analyse what went well and what you can do better. Maybe you can cut down the time you've allowed for a task, or maybe you can request information in a more logical order next time.
7. Improve your filing - Whether it's emails, notes, letters, paperwork or anything else, you can waste a lot of time if you have to search through reams of information to find the piece you need. Instead, make sure that your documents are properly filed away. It might take you a few tries to find a system that works for you but keep at it. Make sure that the filing system is not overly complex.
8. Keep your desk clean - A messy desk or office is not only demoralising, but it can also add to a sense of being disorganised. It can also of course make it hard to find things. Keep your desk clean and tidy.
9. Have contingency time - Part of being organised is making sure that you have time for emergencies because they always pop up when you hope they won't. Make sure to add contingency time into your timetabling or scheduling. This means that one emergency or setback won't throw your planning off completely and it will let you catch up.
10. Say no when needed - It is hard to stay organised when you are constantly taking on new tasks. If you are unable to take on any more tasks (which you should know, if you have timetabled and planned out your work), then you should say so.
11. Do one thing at a time - Trying to split your focus is hard. If possible, only do one task at a time. Of course, sometimes one project has a break and you have to work on other things, but trying to focus on single tasks at once is generally more efficient.

How to include organisational skills in a CV

Looking at how to write a CV but unsure how to include your organisational skills? There are lots of ways to make sure that employers can see your skills. Here are our top tips:

• Match your skills to the job description - Always analyse your skills and see what your strengths are. Then, check what the employer wants and make sure these skills are prominent in your CV.
• Add a skills section - One of the simplest ways to display your skills is to have a bullet-pointed list of the skills you have. This helps potential employers see this information at a glance. Be sure to put the skills they are most interested in at the top. You can also split this into hard skills and soft skills.
• Link skills to experience - Employers like to see how you gained your skills, as this helps ground them in real-life experience. You can add skills to relevant descriptions of job experience and education history. This also helps make passages about lower-level jobs more interesting. Mention any experience you have managing a team, deadlines or a project as well as anything that involves goal-setting and decision-making.

To sum up

Organisational skills are how you organise your workflow and workspace. These can be essential for helping improve your productivity, especially if you have lots of different tasks to focus on.

Organisational skills are soft skills which are transferable and will be useful in every job role you apply for.

These career skills include things like time management and planning so they are one of the key career skills employers look for.

You can improve your organisational skills by working on organisational methods and prioritising your workload.

It's helpful to include your organisational skills in your CV, either in a skills list or in your education and employment history.