How to Write a Resume Skills Section

The skills section is the one place a resume is meant to be a list. That makes it the easiest section to get right, and the easiest to fill with things that work against you.

From the team behind PassATS. Free to read, no email required.

What it is for

Two readers use it. A parser uses it to match the exact terms in a posting. A person uses it to see in five seconds whether your toolset fits the job.

Both want the same thing: specific, recognisable names of things you can do, in plain text, under a heading that says Skills.

What to put in it

Hard skills by name. Tools, languages, methods and systems: SQL, Python, Tableau, financial modelling, Salesforce, IFRS. Names a person could test you on.

The posting's wording, where it is true. If they say A/B testing and you wrote "experimentation", use theirs. Matching is often literal. Resume keywords by role lists the common ones per discipline.

Both forms of an acronym, once. CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery) gets the exact match and still reads normally.

What to leave out

Soft skills as list items. "Communication", "teamwork" and "problem solving" say nothing in a list, because everyone writes them. Show them in a bullet instead: "Presented the forecast to the board each quarter" is communication with evidence.

Ratings. Bars, stars and percentages are graphics a parser cannot read and a recruiter does not trust. "Python 80%" raises the question of what the other 20% is.

Everything you have ever opened. A tool you used once three years ago is a liability in an interview. List what you would be comfortable being asked about.

Basics nobody screens for. Email, web browsing and Microsoft Word, unless the posting specifically asks for them.

How many, and how to lay it out

Twelve to twenty is a useful range. Fewer can look thin against a long posting; many more reads as a dump.

Group them when the list is long, one group per line: Languages: Python, SQL, R then Tools: Tableau, dbt, Snowflake. It reads faster and it is still plain text.

Commas or simple separators, not a table or columns of small cells, which can extract out of order.

Where it goes

Near the top, after your summary, if your skills are the strongest part of your case, which is common when changing careers. After experience if your history speaks for itself.

Either way it needs a standard heading: Skills, or Technical Skills. A creative heading like "My Toolkit" can leave the whole list unclassified. The ATS-friendly structure shows the full order.

Back every one up

A skill that appears in the list and nowhere else is a claim. The same skill inside a bullet, with what you did and what changed, is evidence.

Go down your list and find where each one appears in your experience. If it appears nowhere, either add the bullet that proves it or take it off the list.