The skills section: what to list, how to lay it out

What the skills section is for

The skills section does two jobs. For a recruiter searching a database, it is where the posting's terms should appear, spelled the way the posting spells them. For a person skimming the page, it is a ten-second inventory of what you can do before they read how you did it. A section that serves both is short, specific and ordered for the role in front of you.

It is not where you prove anything. Proof lives in the bullets under each job. The skills list says “Python, dbt, Airflow”; the experience section says what you built with them and what changed. If a skill appears in the list and nowhere else on the page, a careful reader notices.

Hard skills in, soft skills out

Hard skills are things that can be named and tested: languages, tools, methods, standards, certifications, spoken languages. Soft skills are qualities: communication, teamwork, leadership, attention to detail. Every applicant claims the same soft skills, so listing them carries no information and takes space from terms a recruiter might actually search for.

Show soft skills instead. “Presented quarterly results to the board” shows communication; “Trained four new hires on the till” shows teaching and reliability. Those bullets are evidence; a word in a list is a claim.

How parsers read it

A parser looks for a heading it recognises (Skills, Technical Skills, Core Competencies) and treats the text under it as a list, splitting on commas, bullets or line breaks. Plain comma-separated text and simple one-per-line lists parse cleanly. Skill bars, star ratings, percentage circles and icons do not: they contain no text, or they contain a number that means nothing to anyone. Two-column skill grids can interleave, so “Python Figma” arrives as one term.

Write abbreviations and full forms together the first time a term appears anywhere on the page, because you do not know which the recruiter will type: “search engine optimisation (SEO)”, “Certified Public Accountant (CPA)”. Spell product names as their makers do: PostgreSQL, Power BI, SolidWorks.

Three layouts that work

The single line: one comma-separated list of eight to fifteen terms, strongest or most relevant first. Best for early careers and for roles where the tools are few. Reads fast; parses perfectly.

Grouped by category: three to five labelled lines, such as Languages, Frameworks, Data, Tools, or for a nurse: Clinical, Systems, Certifications. Best when you have twenty or more legitimate skills and the reader needs them sorted. Keep the labels plain and the lines short.

Woven into experience with a short list: the skills appear in bullets where they were used, and the skills section holds only the ten searchable terms. Best for senior roles, where a long inventory looks junior and the bullets already carry the evidence.

How many, and in what order

Eight to fifteen terms for most people; up to twenty-five in a grouped layout for technical roles. Order them by relevance to the posting, not alphabetically and not by how long you have used them. If the posting lists Excel, Power Query and Tableau, those three lead your list.

Only list what you could be interviewed on tomorrow. A tool you used once in 2019 is not a skill; it is a liability when the interviewer asks about it. Remove anything you would need to look up before answering a question.

Proficiency: how to show it without ratings

Do not rate your own skills with bars, stars or words like “Expert”. Nobody knows what four of five means, and “Expert” invites a hard question. If depth matters, show it with years or context in the bullets: “Six years of production Python” or “Led the migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL”. Spoken languages are the exception: give a level on a scale readers know, such as CEFR (B2, C1) or “native”, and an exam score if you have one.

Certifications go in their own section with issuer and year (AWS Solutions Architect Associate, 2025) rather than in the skills list, where they get lost among tools.

Examples by field

The shape is the same across fields: named, searchable, ordered for the posting.

• Backend developer: Go, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS (ECS, RDS, SQS), gRPC, OpenTelemetry.
• Digital marketer: Google Ads, Meta Ads, GA4, Google Tag Manager, Looker Studio, HubSpot, SEO (Ahrefs, Screaming Frog), A/B testing, Klaviyo.
• Accountant: IFRS, US GAAP, SAP FI/CO, Oracle NetSuite, Excel (Power Query, pivot tables), month-end close, VAT returns, audit preparation, Power BI.
• Registered nurse: Acute medical care, IV therapy, wound care, medication administration, Epic, patient triage, BLS and ACLS certified, infection control.
• Mechanical engineer: SolidWorks, AutoCAD, ANSYS, GD&T, DFM, FMEA, tolerance analysis, injection moulding, ISO 9001, MATLAB.

Common mistakes

Each of the following costs more than it adds.

• “Microsoft Office” or “computer skills” on anything other than an entry-level administrative résumé.
• Soft skills listed as skills.
• Bars, stars, percentages, icons.
• A skills list that contradicts the experience section (a tool appears in the list and nowhere else).
• Everything you ever touched, in the order you learned it.
• Spoken languages without a level.
• Certifications buried among tools.