Skills for Your Resume: How to Choose and List Them

Hard skills are specific, teachable and easy to check: Excel pivot tables, forklift operation, Python, phlebotomy, QuickBooks, Spanish. Soft skills describe how you work: communication, reliability, problem solving, leadership. Employers want both, but they evaluate them differently.

• Hard skills go in a skills section, where recruiters and applicant tracking systems look for them, and also inside your bullets when you used them.
• Soft skills are almost worthless as a list, because anyone can type “team player”. Show them with a result instead.

1. Copy the posting into a document and highlight every tool, qualification and skill it mentions.
2. Mark the ones in the “requirements” or “must have” list and the ones that appear more than once: those carry the most weight.
3. Tick off the ones you genuinely have and could discuss in an interview.
4. Use the posting’s exact wording: if it says “accounts receivable”, write that, not only “collections”.
5. Add two or three relevant skills the posting doesn’t mention but the job clearly needs.

If a required skill is one you have only partly, describe it accurately (“Tableau, basic dashboards”) rather than leaving it out or overstating it.

• Keep it to roughly 6 to 12 items. A list of 30 skills hides the ones that matter.
• Group them when the list is long: Software, Technical, Languages, Certifications.
• Add a level or detail where it helps: “Spanish (fluent)”, “Excel (VLOOKUP, pivot tables, macros)”.
• Avoid star ratings and progress bars. They can’t be read by an ATS and “three stars in Photoshop” means nothing to a recruiter.
• Place the section after experience, or near the top under your summary if skills are your strongest selling point.

Use these lists as a starting point. Keep only the skills you actually have, and use the wording of the posting you are answering.

• Customer service: CRM software (Zendesk, Salesforce), de-escalation, phone and chat support, returns and exchanges, bilingual service.
• Retail and cashier: POS systems, cash handling and balancing a drawer, merchandising, inventory counts, opening and closing procedures.
• Warehouse and logistics: forklift and pallet jack operation (with certification), RF scanners, picking and packing, shipping and receiving, cycle counts.
• Office and administration: calendar management, data entry, Microsoft 365, records management, travel booking, invoicing.
• Healthcare: patient intake, vital signs, EHR systems such as Epic or Cerner, HIPAA compliance, BLS certification.
• Accounting and finance: account reconciliation, accounts payable and receivable, month-end close, QuickBooks or NetSuite, advanced Excel.
• Software development: languages (JavaScript, Python, Java), frameworks, SQL, Git, cloud platforms, testing.
• Marketing: SEO, email marketing platforms, Google Analytics, social media scheduling, copywriting, Canva or Adobe tools.
• Sales: prospecting, pipeline management, CRM, negotiation, account management, product demos.
• Skilled trades: blueprint reading, specific tools and equipment, safety procedures, relevant licenses or certifications.

Transferable skills are the ones that carry over from one field to another: training people, managing a budget, scheduling, handling complaints, writing reports. When you change careers, put them in a short skills section near the top and back each one with an example from your previous work.

Translate jargon from your old field. A teacher’s “differentiated instruction” becomes “adapting training to different learning levels” on a corporate resume.