Skills to Put on a Resume (and What to Cut)
Published · 11 min read
Put the skills the job ad asks for, in the words the job ad uses, and only the ones you can defend in an interview. Everything else on this page is detail about how to do that well — but that sentence is the whole method, and it is the part most skills lists leave out.
The reason it matters: a skills section is not a description of you. It is a claim you are making to one specific employer about one specific job. The same person applying to two roles should have two different skills sections, and if yours is identical across every application, it is doing almost nothing.
How do you decide which skills to list?
Open the job ad in one window and your resume in the other. Read the ad twice: once for the responsibilities, once for the requirements. Write down every concrete noun — the tools, systems, methods, certifications and languages. Those are your candidates.
Then sort them into three piles. Things you have genuinely done. Things you have touched but could not be questioned on for ten minutes. Things you have never done. The first pile goes on the resume. The second pile goes on only if you are honest about the level and prepared to say so out loud. The third pile does not go on, ever, because the interview is where that ends badly.
Tip: If the ad says "Power BI" do not write "data visualisation tools". Mirror the ad's exact wording for the specific things, because both the software and the human are scanning for a match, and a synonym makes them work for it.
Hard skills and soft skills are not equal
Hard skills are the checkable ones: a language, a framework, a machine, a standard, a certification. They belong in a skills section because they are fast to scan and easy to verify. If you list Python, an interviewer can ask you a Python question and find out.
Soft skills are the unfalsifiable ones: communication, teamwork, leadership, problem-solving, attention to detail. Everybody claims them and nobody can be disproved, which is exactly why listing them buys you very little. The words are not worthless, but they are worthless as a list.
Move them into your experience section, where they can carry evidence. "Communication" in a skills list says nothing. "Ran the weekly handover between the clinical team and IT, which cut duplicate tickets" says the same thing and can be believed.
What a skills section should actually look like
Short, grouped, and specific. Somewhere between eight and fifteen entries for most roles, arranged in two or three labelled groups so a reader can find the group that matters to them. More than about fifteen and the section stops being a summary and becomes a word cloud.
- Group by kind, not by confidence: "Languages", "Tools", "Clinical systems", "Certifications".
- Put the group the job ad cares most about first.
- Write each entry the way the industry writes it: "PostgreSQL", not "postgres db".
- Keep it to plain text separated by commas or simple bullets.
- Repeat the important ones inside your experience bullets, where they have context.
Why skill bars and percentages are a bad idea
Progress bars, five-star ratings and "Python 85%" look designed, and they say nothing. Eighty-five per cent of what? Nobody has a scale. The reader either ignores it or wonders what the missing fifteen per cent is, and neither reaction helps you.
There is a practical problem too. Those bars are usually drawn as graphics or table cells, and anything that is not text is a coin flip when software reads your resume. A skill that renders as a picture of a bar can arrive on the other side as nothing at all.
If a level genuinely matters — languages are the common case — write it in words that mean something specific. "Finnish (working proficiency)" or "Spanish (native)" tells a reader more than four filled circles out of five.
Formatting that survives being read by software
Most large employers put your file through parsing software before a person sees it, and the parser is looking for a heading it recognises followed by text it can read. You do not need to trick it. You need to avoid the handful of choices that genuinely confuse it.
- Call the section "Skills". Not "What I Bring", not "My Toolkit".
- Keep the skills in the normal flow of the document rather than in a text box or a header.
- Avoid multi-column tables for the list; a parser can read the columns in the wrong order.
- Avoid icons standing in for names — a logo is not the word "Excel".
- Send the format the ad asks for, and when it does not say, PDF exported from a real document rather than an image.
Tip: A quick self-test: copy your finished resume out of the PDF and paste it into a plain text editor. Whatever survives that paste is roughly what the software sees. If your skills arrive as a jumble or vanish, the layout is the problem, not your experience.
Skills worth listing, by field
Use these as a prompt for your own memory, not as a menu to copy. A skill you take from a list because it sounded good is a skill you will be asked about.
Software and data
- Languages you would be comfortable writing in front of someone: Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Go, C#, SQL
- The platform you actually deployed on: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Cloudflare
- Version control and CI you have used in a team, not just alone: Git, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI
- Data tools: dbt, Airflow, Power BI, Tableau, pandas
- Testing and quality: unit testing, integration testing, code review
Healthcare and care work
- The record system you worked in by name, because it is rarely transferable and always asked about
- Certifications with their real titles and expiry dates
- Clinical procedures you are signed off on
- Medication administration, where your registration allows it
- Languages spoken with patients, at an honest level
Marketing and content
- Analytics you have configured, not just opened: GA4, Search Console, Looker Studio
- Ad platforms you have run a budget on, with the scale of that budget kept for the experience section
- SEO work you can describe end to end: keyword research, technical audits, content briefs
- Email and automation platforms: Klaviyo, HubSpot, Mailchimp
- Design tools only if you produce the assets yourself
Operations, admin and finance
- The ERP or accounting system by name: SAP, NetSuite, Xero, Procountor
- Excel, but only if you mean the parts that are a skill — pivot tables, lookups, Power Query
- Scheduling, payroll or procurement systems you administered
- Standards and frameworks you have worked to: ISO 9001, GDPR, SOX
- Process work you have actually run: onboarding, stock counts, month-end close
The skills that are costing you space
Some entries actively work against you, because they signal that you needed to fill a section.
- "Microsoft Word" and "email" — assumed for every office job since roughly 2005.
- "Hard worker", "team player", "fast learner" — descriptions of attitude, not skills, and nobody claims the opposite.
- "Internet research".
- Anything you last used a decade ago and could not open today.
- Long lists of adjacent tools you tried once, which dilute the ones you are good at.
Rewriting a real skills section
Before: "Communication, teamwork, Microsoft Office, hard working, problem solving, attention to detail, leadership, time management, Windows, internet."
That is ten entries that would fit any person and any job. It survives no scrutiny and matches no ad in particular.
After, for a junior data analyst ad asking for SQL, Power BI and stakeholder reporting: "Data: SQL (PostgreSQL, BigQuery), Python (pandas), Excel (Power Query, pivot tables). Reporting: Power BI, Looker Studio, GA4. Ways of working: requirements gathering with non-technical stakeholders, documentation, Git."
Same person, same career. The second version mirrors the ad, names things that can be checked, and quietly makes the soft skills concrete by describing where they were used. The teamwork claim is gone, and the evidence for it is now in the experience section where it belongs.
How many skills should a resume list?
Enough to cover what the ad asks for, plus the two or three things that make you unusual. For most people that lands between eight and fifteen. A senior specialist may run longer if the tools genuinely are the job; a first resume will be shorter, and short is fine.
The failure to avoid is padding. Twenty-five skills does not read as broad, it reads as unsorted, and it buries the four that would have got you the interview.
Where the skills section goes
If your experience is the strongest thing about you, put experience first and skills below it. If you are changing field, starting out, or the role is defined by a specific toolset, put skills near the top where they will be read before the job titles that do not match yet.
Either way, keep it on the first page. A skills section on page two of a two-page resume is a skills section that a hurried reader never reaches.
The check before you send it
- Every skill in the ad that you genuinely have appears somewhere on the resume, in the ad's own words.
- Every skill you listed appears again in your experience, doing something.
- You could talk for ten minutes about any single entry.
- Nothing in the section is an adjective.
- The section survives being pasted into a plain text editor.
Do that for each application and the skills section stops being decoration. It becomes the fastest argument on the page that you are the person the ad was written for.