Skills to Put on a Resume: 130+ Examples and How to Choose Them

Start with the job description, not a skills list

Before you write a single skill, open the posting you are applying to and read it with a highlighter. Mark every noun that names a tool, a method, a certification, or a measurable capability. "Experience with Salesforce and HubSpot," "comfortable running A/B tests," "CPA preferred," "manage a cross-functional roadmap" — those are your candidate skills, written in the employer's own words. Now sort what you highlighted into three piles. Pile one is skills you have used in a job, internship, or project. Pile two is skills you have some exposure to but could not defend in an interview. Pile three is skills you do not have. Pile one goes on the resume. Pile three does not. Pile two is a judgment call — include it only if you could talk for two minutes about something you built or fixed with it. Match the employer's phrasing where it is reasonable. If the posting says "CRM," and you have used Salesforce, write "Salesforce (CRM)" so both the software's name and the generic category appear. Recruiters skim for the term they wrote, and search filters look for it literally. This is not keyword stuffing — it is answering the question in the language it was asked. When a posting is vague — and plenty are — go to the source employers themselves draw on. O*NET OnLine, the US Department of Labor's occupational database, lists the technology skills and work activities associated with each occupation, and the Occupational Outlook Handbook from the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes the qualifications employers typically expect. Both are free and neither is trying to sell you a resume review.

Hard skills vs. soft skills, and how many of each

Hard skills are teachable and verifiable: software, programming languages, certifications, machinery, spoken languages, regulatory frameworks, analytical methods. They are either true or not, and an interviewer can test them. These carry the most weight on a resume because they are the fastest way for a hiring team to filter. Soft skills describe how you work: communication, adaptability, problem-solving, leadership, conflict resolution, time management. They matter enormously in the job and very little as bare words on a page, because anyone can type them. "Excellent communicator" is unverifiable. "Presented quarterly forecasts to a 40-person sales org" demonstrates the same thing and cannot be faked. A practical split: roughly 70 percent hard skills, 30 percent soft, in a list of 8 to 12 total. Put the soft skills you genuinely lead with in the list, then make sure your experience bullets show them in action rather than repeating the adjective. Our resume examples show how that looks on a finished page.

15 examples across 1 groups

Skills to put on a resume by job type

Below are 132 skills grouped into 11 job families. They are drawn from the terms that recur in live US job postings and in the occupational skill listings published by the Department of Labor — not from a general brainstorm of things that sound employable. Treat them as a prompt for your own memory, not a copy-paste list. Take only the ones that are true for you and appear in the posting. A skill you cannot discuss in an interview costs you more than the empty line it filled. If your role spans two families — a marketing analyst, say — pull from both.

132 examples across 11 groups

How an applicant tracking system reads your skills

Most mid-size and large employers run resumes through an applicant tracking system before a person opens them. The system parses your file into structured fields and lets a recruiter search and filter the pool — often by typing a skill into a search box and seeing who comes back. That mechanic explains most of the practical rules. Write skills as plain text under a heading the parser recognizes, such as "Skills" or "Technical Skills." In our own parser testing, the failure we see most often is not an exotic one: skills placed in a sidebar, table, or text box get read in the wrong order, merged into the neighbouring column, or dropped entirely. A two-column layout that looks elegant in your editor is the single most reliable way to lose the section. Skip star ratings and progress bars too — they carry no parseable information, and a five-star self-assessment of Python means nothing to a reviewer. Spell out acronyms on first use and pair them with the full term, because you cannot know which one the recruiter searched for. "Search engine optimization (SEO)" matches both. The same goes for tool names people write inconsistently: "Microsoft Excel" and "MS Excel" are not the same string to a literal search. If you would rather not think about any of this, start from a layout that already parses cleanly — our ATS-friendly resume templates are single-column for exactly this reason. A word on what these systems do not do: no mainstream ATS assigns your resume a secret score that decides your fate, and nobody outside the vendor knows the ranking internals of Workday or Greenhouse. Anyone promising to "beat the algorithm" is guessing. The realistic goal is to make sure your resume parses cleanly and contains the terms a human will search for.

Where skills belong on the page

Your skills should appear in two places, doing two different jobs. The Skills section is the scannable index. Keep it to 8 to 12 entries, grouped if the list is long — "Languages: Python, SQL, R" reads faster than an undifferentiated run-on. Place it near the top for technical and early-career roles, where the tools are the qualification. Place it after your experience for senior roles, where what you delivered matters more than which software you opened. Your experience bullets are where the same skills get proven. Every important skill in your list should reappear inside a bullet, attached to a context and a result. This is the part almost everyone skips, and it is the difference between a resume that lists competencies and one that demonstrates them. One caution on the two-place rule: it means repetition, and repetition is fine. A recruiter scanning for "Tableau" should hit it in the list and again in the bullet where you built something with it. What is not fine is a Skills section that has no relationship to the rest of the page. Your cover letter is the third place these skills surface — but there you pick one or two and tell the story behind them, rather than repeating the list.

Skills to put on a resume with no experience

With no formal work history, the instinct is to fall back on personality adjectives. Resist it — everyone claims to be hardworking and nobody is screened in on it. You almost certainly have more concrete material than you think. Coursework and projects count. A statistics course where you ran regressions in R is R experience. A capstone where you built a website is HTML, CSS, and version control. Say where it came from — "Python (coursework, 3 projects)" is honest and still searchable. So does everything outside a classroom: volunteering, sports, student organizations, family responsibilities, freelance and gig work. Treasurer of a student club is budgeting and financial reporting. A part-time serving job is customer service, cash handling, and working under pressure. Running a team's social accounts is content scheduling and basic analytics. Certifications are the fastest way to add defensible hard skills when your history is thin, and several that employers recognize are free or cheap: Google Analytics, HubSpot inbound marketing, Microsoft Office Specialist, OSHA 10, CPR and BLS. Each one turns a vague interest into a line an employer can verify.

Skills that hurt you more than they help

Skills nobody is impressed by. Microsoft Word, email, internet research, and basic computer literacy are assumed for office work. Listing them signals you had trouble filling the section. Excel is worth keeping only if you name what you can actually do with it — pivot tables, VLOOKUP, macros, financial modeling. Skills you cannot defend. Every skill on your resume is a question you are inviting. Listing a language you studied for two semesters and cannot hold a conversation in is a bad trade, and a technical screen will find it in minutes. Rating systems. Star ratings, percentages, and progress bars are self-assigned, unverifiable, and frequently unparseable. "Python ★★★★☆" communicates less than one bullet describing something you built. Obsolete tools, unless the posting names them. Listing software that has been out of use for a decade dates you without adding anything. The same list for every application. A generic skills section is the single most common reason a qualified candidate gets filtered out. Reorder and swap the list for each posting — it usually takes two minutes and it is the highest-leverage edit on the page. More guidance on the rest of the application lives in our career advice guides.