Skills to Put on a Resume (With Real Examples)

The skills section looks easy — just list what you're good at, right? But it's where a lot of resumes quietly lose points. Too vague, too long, or full of things nobody's hiring for.

Here's how to get it right.

Two kinds of skills — you need both

• Hard skills are teachable and specific: Excel, Python, phlebotomy, forklift licence, Adobe Photoshop.
• Soft skills are how you work: communication, leadership, problem-solving.

Recruiters (and ATS software) scan hard skills first because they're easy to match against the job. But soft skills win the interview. Balance both.

Only list what the job wants

Your resume isn't a full inventory of everything you can do. It's a pitch for this role. Read the job posting, note the skills it asks for, and lead with the ones you genuinely have. Ten relevant skills beat thirty random ones.

Group them so they're scannable

A wall of comma-separated words is hard to read. Group into categories:

Technical: Excel, SQL, Power BI

Design: Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma

Languages: English (fluent), Arabic (native)

Don't just list soft skills — prove them

"Great communicator" means nothing on its own. Show it instead, in a bullet: "Rewrote the top 10 help-centre articles, cutting repeat tickets 18%." That's communication, demonstrated.

Skip these

• Skill rating bars ("Excel ▓▓▓▓░") — they signal nothing and break ATS parsing.
• Obvious basics ("Microsoft Word", "email") unless the job specifically asks.
• Anything you couldn't discuss confidently in an interview.

Examples by field

• Customer service: CRM (Zendesk), de-escalation, first-contact resolution.
• Nursing: patient assessment, medication administration, IV therapy, EHR systems.
• Developer: TypeScript, React, SQL, Docker, CI/CD.

Let AI group them for you

Not sure how to organise your skills? [Build](/build) or [improve](/improve) your resume and the AI groups them into sensible categories and matches them to your target role — then [score it free](/score) to check nothing important is missing.