Skills to Put on a Resume: Hard Skills, Soft Skills and Lists by Field

Hard skills, soft skills and transferable skills

Every skill on a resume falls into one of three groups. Knowing which is which tells you where each one belongs and how to prove it.

• Hard skills are learned, specific and testable: a programming language, a tool, a method or a licence. Python, TallyPrime, Figma, GST filing, IV cannulation and SEO are hard skills. You can list them as plain words because a reader can check them.
• Soft skills are how you work with people and problems: communication, teamwork, leadership, problem-solving, time management. Everyone claims them, so a bare list proves nothing. They need evidence in your bullets.
• Transferable skills travel from one job, industry or setting to another. Some are hard (Excel modelling, project planning) and some are soft (negotiating, training people). They matter most when you are changing careers or writing your first resume, because they connect what you have done to what the new job needs.

Here is how the three look for one person, a school teacher moving into corporate training. Hard: lesson planning, Google Classroom, assessment design. Soft: presenting to large groups, handling difficult conversations with parents. Transferable: designing a course and measuring whether people learned from it, which is exactly what a learning and development team does. If you are making a move like this, the career change resume guide shows how to lead with transferable skills.

How to choose skills from a job description

The best skills list for a job is mostly written for you in the job ad. Work from the posting, not from a generic list.

1. Copy the requirements into a note. Take the "Requirements", "Skills" and "What you'll do" sections.
2. Highlight every hard skill and tool. Software, methods, certifications, regulations and languages.
3. Mark the ones that repeat or sit under "must have". These go first in your list and into your summary.
4. Tick only the ones you genuinely have. If you could not talk about a skill for two minutes in an interview, leave it out.
5. Use the employer's wording. If the ad says "Microsoft Power BI", write that, not "BI dashboards". Where both forms are common, write the full term and the acronym once, such as "search engine optimisation (SEO)".
6. Check two or three similar postings. Skills that appear in all of them are standard for the role, not one company's preference.

A worked example: a data analyst posting asks for "SQL, Power BI, stakeholder communication, advanced Excel, Python preferred". You have used SQL and Power BI daily, Excel for pivot tables and Power Query, and Python only in a course. Your list leads with SQL, Power BI and advanced Excel, and Python goes in as "Python (pandas, coursework)". Honest, and still matched. The guide to resume keywords for ATS screening goes deeper into matching the wording.

Where to put skills on your resume

A skill listed once in a skills section is a claim. The same skill shown in three places is a pattern a recruiter believes. Use each part of the resume for a different job:

• Skills section. A short, scannable list of hard skills and tools under a standard heading such as "Skills" or "Key skills" (the usual label on UK and Australian CVs). Standard headings help parsing software file the list in the right place. For technical roles, group it: Languages, Frameworks, Cloud, Tools.
• Summary. Name your two or three most relevant skills in the first lines, for example "Accountant with six years in GST compliance, month-end close and TallyPrime."
• Experience bullets. This is where skills become evidence: "Built a Power BI dashboard that replaced four weekly Excel reports for the sales team."
• Certifications. Licences and certificates such as CA, ACCA, CPA, PMP, AWS or BLS belong in their own section, with the issuing body and year.

Where the skills section sits depends on your story. Experienced candidates usually put it after experience or in a side column. Freshers, career changers and people returning after a gap often put it near the top, because their skills are stronger than their job history. That is the idea behind a skills-based resume template: a grouped skills block before experience, with your jobs still listed underneath so nothing looks hidden.

How many skills to put on a resume

There is no single rule that recruiters agree on, but a practical range works for most people:

• Most roles: 8 to 15 skills in the skills section. Enough to cover the core requirements of the job, few enough that each one reads as real.
• Technical roles: up to about 20, grouped under three to five labels so the list scans quickly. A flat line of 30 tools looks like a keyword dump.
• Freshers: 6 to 10 is fine. List what you have used in projects, internships and coursework, and show where in your bullets, rather than padding the list.

Order matters more than count. Put the skills that match the job ad first, then supporting skills. If a skill appears in the posting and you have it, it should not be the last item on your list.

Should you show levels? A short word is fine when it helps, such as "French (conversational)" or "Python (advanced), R (working knowledge)". Spoken languages are worth listing in India, where many roles value English, Hindi and a regional language, and anywhere a customer-facing job names a language. Keep the rest of the space for proof.

Show the skill instead of claiming it

Adjectives are the weakest way to present a skill. "Excellent communication skills" and "strong leadership" appear on so many resumes that readers skip them. Replace the claim with a line that shows the skill in use, with a result where you have one.

• Weak: "Excellent communication skills." Stronger: "Wrote the onboarding guide now used for every new support hire; cut first-week escalations to senior staff by about a third."
• Weak: "Team player." Stronger: "Worked with design and QA to ship the checkout redesign two weeks before the festive sale."
• Weak: "Problem-solving." Stronger: "Traced a recurring stock mismatch to a unit-of-measure error in the ERP, corrected the master data and stopped the monthly write-offs."
• Weak: "Leadership." Stronger: "Led a team of six field sales executives; two were promoted to area manager within a year."
• Weak: "Proficient in Excel." Stronger: "Automated the weekly sales report with Power Query, saving about four hours a week."

Each stronger version starts with a verb and names a tool, a group of people or a number. That is what makes it believable. You can still keep a few soft skills in your skills list if the job ad names them, but make sure a bullet somewhere backs each one up. These resume action verbs help you open those lines well.

Skills to put on a resume, by field

Use these as a starting point, then cut each list down to what the job ad and your experience support.

• Software and IT: Python, Java, JavaScript or TypeScript, React, Node.js, SQL, REST APIs, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure or GCP, CI/CD, unit testing, system design, code review. See the software engineer resume template.
• Data and analytics: SQL, Excel (pivot tables, XLOOKUP, Power Query), Power BI, Tableau, Python (pandas), statistics, A/B testing, data cleaning, dashboard design, ETL, presenting findings to non-technical teams. The data analyst resume template shows them grouped.
• Marketing: SEO, Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, Meta Ads, content strategy, copywriting, email marketing, marketing automation (HubSpot), social media management, campaign reporting, conversion rate optimisation, brand guidelines. See the marketing resume template.
• Sales: prospecting, lead qualification, consultative selling, negotiation, CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho), pipeline management, forecasting, account management, territory planning, product demos, closing.
• Finance and accounting: financial modelling, budgeting and forecasting, variance analysis, month-end close, reconciliations, audit support, tax (GST in India and Australia, VAT in the UK), accounting standards (Ind AS, IFRS, US GAAP), TallyPrime, SAP FICO, QuickBooks or Xero, advanced Excel.
• Healthcare and nursing: patient assessment, medication administration, IV therapy, wound care, infection control, triage, care planning, EHR charting (Epic, Cerner), BLS and ACLS, patient and family education, plus your registration, such as NMC in the UK, AHPRA in Australia or a state RN licence in the US. See the nurse resume template.
• Education: lesson planning, curriculum design (CBSE, IB, GCSE, Common Core), classroom management, differentiated instruction, assessment and grading, Google Classroom or Moodle, special educational needs support (SEN in the UK, IEPs in the US), parent communication.
• Operations and supply chain: process improvement, Lean, Six Sigma, inventory management, vendor management, SAP MM or another ERP, demand planning, logistics, SOP writing, KPI reporting, health and safety compliance.
• Design: Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, wireframing, prototyping, user research, usability testing, design systems, typography, accessibility (WCAG), motion design in After Effects.

Skills to leave off your resume

• Microsoft Word, email and "internet browsing". For most roles these are assumed, and listing them uses space a real skill could fill. The exceptions: office and administrative roles where the ad asks for Microsoft Office, and advanced Excel anywhere, which is a genuine skill worth naming precisely.
• Outdated or retired technology. Adobe Flash, Internet Explorer support or Windows XP can make the whole list look old. Keep legacy skills only when the job maintains legacy systems and says so.
• Skill bars, stars, dots and percentages. "Python 80%" raises the question "80% of what?", and a bar has no meaning a reader can check. Parsing software extracts text, so a graphic level is usually lost or turns into stray characters. Use words instead, or nothing.
• Generic soft skills with no proof. "Hardworking, punctual, dedicated" says nothing a hiring manager can use. Keep the soft skills the ad names and your bullets prove.
• Skills you cannot discuss. An interviewer may pick any line on your resume and ask about it. A skill from a one-day workshop years ago is a risk, not an asset.
• Hobbies dressed as skills. "Cricket" or "travelling" belongs, if anywhere, in a short interests line, not in your skills.

When in doubt, ask one question: would this skill change the hiring manager's decision for this job? If not, cut it.

Building your skills section with ResumeInk

If you already have a resume, upload it as a PDF, Word file or photo. ResumeInk's AI reads it and rebuilds it in a designed template, with your skills in their own section. From there:

• Click any skill to edit it, reorder sections, or hide the ones a particular job does not need.
• Use the optional AI help to suggest skills for your role or to tailor the resume to a job description. Review each suggestion and keep only what is true.
• Check the ATS score, which shows how readable the resume is for hiring software, or run an existing file through the ATS resume checker.
• Switch designs without retyping. The Skills-first layout puts a grouped Expertise block before experience, and the Compact header layout shows skills as short chips right under the header.