What Skills to Put on a CV (And What to Leave Out)

The skills section is the part of a CV people write last and think about least. It usually ends up as a wall of words that could be pasted onto anyone's CV: communication, teamwork, Microsoft Office, problem solving, attention to detail.

That version of the section does nothing. It takes up space near the top of your page, it tells a reader nothing they could not have assumed, and it wastes the one place on your CV where an employer's software is doing a direct text comparison against the job ad.

A skills section is worth having. It just has to be built deliberately.

What this section is actually for

Two readers use it, and they use it differently.

The software reads it as a list of terms to match against the requirements in the job posting. It does not evaluate you. It checks whether the words are present and, in better systems, where else in the document they appear.

The human reads it as a thirty second answer to one question: does this person work with the tools we work with? A hiring manager scanning fifty CVs uses your skills block to decide whether to keep reading the rest.

Both readers want specifics. Neither is helped by adjectives about your personality.

Hard skills, soft skills, and which belong here

Hard skills are teachable, nameable and checkable. Python, SQL, SAP, Figma, IFRS, forklift licence, German at B2. Either you can do it or you cannot, and someone could test you on it.

Soft skills are behavioural: communication, leadership, adaptability, negotiation.

Both matter at work. Only one belongs in a list.

The problem with listing soft skills is that the claim and the evidence are the same word. Writing strong communicator is not evidence of being one, and every competing candidate wrote it too. Soft skills are proven, not declared, and the place to prove them is in your experience bullets: ran the weekly handover between operations and customer support, cutting repeat tickets by 20 percent says more about communication than the word ever will.

So: hard skills, tools, languages and certifications go in the skills section. Behavioural qualities go into your experience, where they come with a story attached.

There is one common exception. Some roles list a behavioural requirement as an actual screening criterion, for example stakeholder management in a project role or client facing in consulting. If the ad names it explicitly, it is fair to include it, once.

How to choose what goes in

Work from the job ad, not from memory.

1. Pull the requirements out of the posting. Read the requirements and responsibilities and write down every named tool, method, standard and qualification. You will usually get somewhere between ten and twenty five. 2. Mark the ones you can genuinely back up. Genuinely means you have used it in real work or study, and you would survive a follow up question about it in an interview. 3. List those. In roughly the order the ad prioritises them. 4. Add the ones the ad did not name but the role clearly implies, if you have room. An accounting role that never mentions Excel still assumes it.

Anything you cannot defend in conversation stays off the list. An inflated skills section does not fail at the CV stage, it fails in the interview, which is a far more expensive place to be caught.

The full mirroring method, including how to find the terms an ad repeats, is in tailoring your CV to a job description.

Group them instead of listing them

An undifferentiated line of twenty comma separated words is hard to read and easy to skip. Grouping turns the same content into something a reader can scan in seconds.

Languages and frameworks: Python, JavaScript, React, Node.js Data: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, dbt Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, AWS (EC2, S3, RDS), Terraform Practices: CI/CD, test driven development, code review, incident response

The category labels do real work. They show you understand how the field is organised, and they let a reader find what they came for without reading the whole block.

Use categories that match your profession. Marketing might use channels, analytics, tools. Finance might use reporting, systems, standards. Four to six items per group is a good density, and three to five groups is usually enough.

If you have very few skills to list, skip the categories and use one clean line. Grouping three items looks like padding.

Proficiency levels: mostly leave them out

Star ratings, percentage bars and five point scales are common in CV templates and they are almost always a bad idea.

They are unverifiable, because your four out of five and mine are not the same measurement. They are graphical, which means they frequently do not survive parsing and can carry the skill name away with them. And they invite a question you cannot win: what exactly makes it four rather than five?

There is one place where levels are genuinely expected, and that is spoken languages. There the scale is standardised and employers rely on it. Use the recognised framework for your region, for example German C1, English B2, and put languages in their own section rather than mixing them into technical skills.

For everything else, if a level matters, show it through use: Python (3 years, production data pipelines) is informative in a way that four stars is not.

What the software actually does with this list

Two things worth knowing.

First, matching is largely literal. A system looking for Google Analytics may not credit you for GA4, and one looking for Microsoft Excel may not credit MS Office. Where a tool has both a full name and a common abbreviation, and both appear in the ad, write both once: search engine optimisation (SEO).

Second, context still counts. Many systems weight a skill higher when it also appears inside a job you held, with dates attached, than when it appears only in a list. So the skills section is not a substitute for the rest of your CV. The strongest pattern is a skill named in the list and then visibly used in an experience bullet.

Formatting matters as much as wording here. Skills placed in a text box, a sidebar table or a two column layout are the most common thing to disappear during parsing, which means the section built for the software is the one the software never sees. The layout rules are covered in writing an ATS friendly CV.

Where to put it

For most experienced candidates: after your professional summary and after your work experience, or immediately after the summary if the role is heavily tool driven. Experience is what gets you the interview, and it should come first.

For career changers, recent graduates and anyone whose work history does not obviously match the target role, move it up, directly under the summary. When the job titles do not tell the right story, the skills do. There is a fuller treatment of that situation in writing a CV with no work experience.

Give it a plain heading. Skills, Technical skills or Core skills all work. Invented headings like My toolbox break the heading matching that recruitment software relies on.

How far up it goes when you are changing fields, and what else moves with it, is covered in how to write a career change CV.

What to leave out

Anything universally assumed. Email, internet research, Windows, basic Microsoft Office. Listing these in a professional role suggests you had trouble filling the space.

Skills you last touched years ago, unless the ad asks for them. If you list it, you are inviting the question.

Duplicates in different words. Client relations, customer service and client management on one CV read as padding.

Long tail versions of the same tool. Excel, Excel pivot tables, Excel VLOOKUP and Excel macros are one entry: Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP, macros).

Character adjectives. Hardworking, motivated, detail oriented. Same rule as the summary: if you cannot prove it in a bullet, it is not doing work. More on that in how to write a CV professional summary.

Frequently asked questions

How many skills should I list?

Ten to twenty for most roles, grouped. Under six looks thin, over twenty five stops being a selection and becomes an inventory, which tells a reader you did not choose.

Should the skills section be different for every application?

The categories stay, the contents shift. Reordering so the ad's priorities appear first takes two minutes and it is the part of your CV that gets compared to the posting most directly.

Should I list a skill I am currently learning?

Only if it is far enough along to discuss, and label it honestly: Power BI (in progress, completing certification 2026). A vague claim you cannot support costs more than the missing line.

Do soft skills ever belong in the list?

Only when the ad names one as a requirement, and then only once. Everywhere else, prove them in your experience section instead.

Is a separate languages section necessary?

If you speak more than one language at a useful level, yes. Spoken languages have a recognised scale and employers filter on them, so they deserve their own clearly labelled block.

Do skill bars and star ratings hurt me?

Frequently. They are graphical elements, they often fail to parse, and they claim a precision nobody can verify. Plain text costs nothing and always survives.

Check how yours is read

You can only guess at what an employer's system extracted from your skills section. CvLaunch reads your CV the way that software does, shows you exactly which skills came through, and compares them against a job ad so you can see which required terms are missing. It takes a few seconds, it is free, and it needs no sign up.