Skills to put on a resume: how to choose them, with examples by field

Hard skills are specific, teachable and checkable: a programming language, a piece of software, a method, a licence, a spoken language. Soft skills describe how you work: communication, leadership, problem solving, organisation. Employers want both, but they check them differently, so they belong in different places on your resume.

You’ll also see technical skills (hard skills in technical fields), tools (named software and platforms) and transferable skills: skills that carry from one job or field to another, which can be hard or soft. Those matter most when you’re changing careers.

1. Collect three to five recent ads for the job you want, at the level you want.
2. Copy every skill, tool and qualification they mention into one list.
3. Count how often each appears. Anything in two or more ads is a core skill for that role.
4. Mark each one honestly: “have, with evidence”, “have, basic” or “don’t have”.
5. Build your section from the core skills you have with evidence first, then the rest you genuinely have. Leave out the “don’t have” column, however tempting.

A quick example. Five data analyst ads might mention SQL five times, Excel four times, Tableau or Power BI four times, Python three times, stakeholder communication three times and dbt once. SQL, Excel and your visualisation tool go first; Python goes in if you’ve used it; dbt only if you have real experience with it.

For common roles you can skip most of the counting. Our resume keywords by role pages show what share of live job postings mention each skill, for example for data analysts, and they’re updated daily.

Skills should appear in three places, and each does a different job:

• The skills section is a scannable list for keyword searches and the first quick read.
• The summary names the two or three skills that matter most for this job.
• Your experience bullets prove the skills: the skill in action, with a result.

Here is one skill, Power BI, doing all three jobs on a single resume (details invented):

Summary: “Data analyst with four years in retail, building Power BI and SQL reporting for operations teams.”

Skills: “Visualisation: Power BI, Tableau”

Bullet: “Built a Power BI dashboard tracking stock levels across 40 stores, used daily by regional managers; out-of-stock items fell by 18%.”

A skill that appears only in the list is a claim. A skill that appears in a bullet, with a result, is evidence, and evidence is what gets you to the interview.

Eight to fifteen skills is enough for most resumes. Technical roles that use many tools can go to about twenty, as long as they’re grouped. A grouped list is far easier to scan than a long comma-separated line:

SKILLS
Marketing: paid social (Meta, LinkedIn), SEO, email automation, A/B testing
Tools: HubSpot, Google Analytics 4, Looker Studio, Canva, Figma (basic)
Analysis: Excel, campaign attribution, budget forecasting
Languages: English (native), French (C1)

• Group by type: tools, methods, domains, certifications, languages.
• Write skills the way the ads do. For acronyms, use both forms once: “Search engine optimisation (SEO)”, so either search finds it.
• Leave out rating bars, stars and percentages. “Python: 80%” means nothing to a reader, and graphics don’t survive parsing.
• Give languages a level: native, fluent or, for European employers, the A1–C2 scale.
• Qualify honestly. “Figma (basic)” is better than a confident listing you can’t back up in a technical interview.

Nearly every candidate claims to be a great communicator, so a soft skill in a list carries almost no weight. The same skill shown in a bullet can carry a lot. Some rewrites (details invented):

If an ad lists a soft skill prominently, such as “stakeholder management”, it’s fine to name it in your skills section or summary as well, as long as a bullet backs it up.

These are starting points, not checklists. Keep only what you can genuinely do, and check every list against the ads you’re actually applying to.

Software engineering

One or two main languages (such as Python, Java or TypeScript), frameworks (React, Spring, Django), SQL and databases, APIs (REST, GraphQL), automated testing, Git, CI/CD, a cloud platform (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud), Docker and Kubernetes, system design. Live data: software engineer keywords.

Data and analytics

SQL, Excel, Python or R, Tableau, Power BI or Looker, statistics, A/B testing, data modelling, dbt, data warehouses such as Snowflake or BigQuery.

Project and product management

Planning and scheduling, stakeholder management, risk management, budgeting, Agile and Scrum, Jira or Asana, requirements gathering, roadmapping, user research, and certifications such as PMP or PRINCE2. Live data: project manager keywords.

Sales and account management

Prospecting, pipeline management, discovery calls, negotiation, closing, forecasting, a CRM such as Salesforce or HubSpot, a sales method such as MEDDIC, account planning, renewals and upselling.

Marketing

SEO, paid search and social, content strategy, email marketing and automation, Google Analytics 4, A/B testing, HubSpot or Marketo, copywriting, budget management. Live data: marketing manager keywords.

Finance and accounting

GAAP or IFRS, month-end close, reconciliations, financial reporting, budgeting and forecasting, financial modelling, advanced Excel, an ERP such as SAP, Oracle or NetSuite, and qualifications such as CPA, ACCA or CMA.

HR and recruiting

Sourcing, structured interviewing, applicant tracking systems, onboarding, employee relations, HR policy, employment law basics, an HRIS such as Workday, compensation and benefits, people analytics.

Customer success and support

Onboarding, account health monitoring, renewals, churn reduction, business reviews, escalation handling, product training, and tools such as Zendesk, Gainsight or Intercom.

Healthcare and nursing

Patient assessment, care planning, medication administration, IV therapy, wound care, electronic health records such as Epic or Cerner, infection control, patient education, BLS or ACLS certification and your licence. Live data: nurse keywords.

Operations and logistics

Process improvement (Lean, Six Sigma), inventory management, supply chain planning, vendor management, KPI reporting, ERP or warehouse management systems, health and safety, scheduling.

If you’re changing careers or applying for your first job, your skills section can’t lean on job titles, so it has to work harder. Start from the new field’s ads, then look for places where you’ve used those skills under a different name:

• A retail supervisor has done scheduling, stock forecasting and staff training: operations skills in a different setting.
• A teacher has planned courses, presented to groups and assessed results: the core of training and instructional design.
• A student may have used statistics software, run a society’s budget or carried out original research for a dissertation.

Name each skill in the new field’s words, then make sure one bullet shows where you used it, so the claim has a source. Our career change resume guide shows how to build the whole document around that evidence.

These are hard skills with proof attached, so place them deliberately:

• Required by the job (a nursing licence, a CPA, a forklift licence, a security clearance): put it where it’s seen first, in the summary or at the top of the skills section, and again in a Certifications section with the issuer and year.
• Nice to have: a Certifications section below education is enough.
• In progress or expired: say so plainly, for example “expected June 2027”. A certification you let lapse years ago is better left out than presented as current.
• Languages: give every language a level. European employers understand the A1–C2 scale; in the US, “fluent” or “conversational” is the norm.

• Listing everything you’ve ever touched. It buries the skills that matter, and an interviewer can ask about any of them.
• Outdated basics such as “Microsoft Word”, “email” or “internet”. They’re assumed. Advanced Excel or a named tool from the ad is different.
• Job titles listed as skills. “Project manager” or “data analyst” is a role, not a skill. List what the role uses: project planning, SQL, forecasting.
• Adjectives instead of skills: “hard-working, motivated, passionate” fills space without telling the reader anything.
• Keyword stuffing or hidden text. Recruiters read the plain-text version of your resume, where white-font keywords show up, and it looks like manipulation.
• Inconsistent names such as “JS” in one place and “JavaScript” in another. Use the ad’s version everywhere.

Keep a master list of every skill you could honestly claim. For each application, move the ad’s top skills to the front of each group, drop the ones it doesn’t care about, and make sure your summary names the two that matter most. Our guide to tailoring your CV without lying covers the full method, and our step-by-step guide on how to write a resume shows where the skills section fits into the rest of the document.

To see how one role’s skills look on a finished page, open a model such as the data analyst resume example. Then check your own: the free CV score checker compares your resume with a job ad and lists the skills and keywords the ad uses that your resume doesn’t show.