Skills for a Resume: 300+ Examples by Industry and Career Level (2026)

The Quick Answer: What Skills to Put on a Resume

List 8 to 12 skills, weighted roughly 60% hard skills and 40% soft skills, and pull the exact wording from the job posting. Hard skills (tools, languages, certifications, measurable proficiencies) carry the ATS keyword match. Soft skills earn their place only when the posting names them and your work experience proves them.

Group them under labelled sub-headings rather than one long comma-separated line. A recruiter scanning for six seconds and a parser scanning for keywords both read grouped skills faster, and grouping is what separates the before/after examples further down this page.

Skip anything that is a baseline expectation (Microsoft Word, email, "hard worker"), anything you could not answer a follow-up question about, and anything the posting never mentions.

Why Your Skills Section Can Make or Break ATS Screening

82.3% of companies use Applicant Tracking Systems to screen resumes before a human reads them (Novoresume survey, 203 HR professionals). ATS filters work primarily by matching keywords in your resume against keywords in the job posting. The skills section is one of the first places those systems look.

At the same time, 70% of employers are now using skills-based hiring during screening (NACE Job Outlook 2026, up from 65% the prior year). This means recruiters are explicitly trained to look for skills evidence, not just job titles and degrees. A skills section that is vague, generic, or mismatched to the role hurts you at both the ATS and human review stages.

Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills: The 60/40 Framework

Hard skills are specific, teachable, and measurable: Python, financial modeling, HIPAA compliance, Adobe Illustrator. Soft skills describe how you work: communication, adaptability, problem-solving. Both matter, but for different reasons and different audiences.

A December 2025 survey of 1,005 U.S. hiring managers (ResumeTemplates.com) found 62% say hard and soft skills are equally valuable. 24% say soft skills matter more. Only 14% prioritize hard skills alone, and that figure has dropped by half since 2019.

The practical rule: aim for a skills section that is roughly 60% hard skills and 40% soft skills. The hard skills get you through ATS. The soft skills signal to the human reader that you can function in the role. Listing only hard skills looks robotic; listing only soft skills looks unqualified.

Hard Skills to Put on a Resume (by Category)

Hard skills are teachable, measurable, and verifiable abilities: software, certifications, languages, machinery, and methodologies. They are the skills ATS keyword matching cares about most, and they are the ones recruiters scan first. Below are the highest-ROI hard skills by category, pulled from Lightcast 2025 job posting data and LinkedIn Skills on the Rise 2026.

For industry-specific hard skills beyond these categories, see our resume keywords by industry guide (200+ keywords across 10 industries).

Technical Skills to Put on a Resume (Tech Roles)

Technical skills are the subset of hard skills specific to engineering, IT, and data roles: programming languages, frameworks, infrastructure, tools, and methodologies. List them in a dedicated "Technical Skills" section on your resume, then prove them with quantified bullets in your experience section. Below are the technical skills currently appearing most often in US job postings by role category (LinkedIn Workforce Report 2024, Lightcast 2025).

AI Skills in 2026: What to List and What to Skip

AI literacy is the #1 fastest-growing skill in job postings according to LinkedIn's Skills on the Rise 2026 report. Jobscan recorded a 30% rise in AI-related hard skill mentions in job descriptions from 2024 to 2025. Listing AI skills is no longer cutting-edge; it is expected.

The problem: 27.2% of workers list AI skills on their resume that they can only perform with significant AI assistance (Novoresume AI and work survey, 1,000 US workers). Recruiters are increasingly aware of this gap and probe AI skills directly in interviews.

How to Choose the Right Skills for Your Resume

The single most effective action is to mirror the language in the job description. ATS systems compare your resume to the job posting. If the posting says "financial modeling" and your resume says "financial analysis," you may not match, even though the terms overlap significantly.

Over 70% of jobs require medium-to-high digital skills (ITIF). Even non-technical roles now expect familiarity with project management software, CRM systems, and collaboration tools. Listing the specific tool name (Salesforce, Jira, HubSpot) outperforms the generic category every time.

Top Skills by Category

These lists are organized by skill category with the most in-demand items first. Use the tables in the next section to filter by industry.

Technical and Computer Skills

Data and Analytics Skills

Management and Leadership Skills

Finance and Accounting Skills

Marketing Skills

Healthcare Skills

HR and Recruiting Skills

Operations Skills

Skills NOT to Put on a Resume

A bloated skills section is as damaging as a thin one. Generic, expected, or outdated skills dilute the signal and waste the recruiter's time.

How to Format the Skills Section

ATS systems parse skills sections differently depending on format. Keep it simple to ensure full extraction.

Placement: for most professionals with 2+ years of experience, the skills section belongs after your summary and before your work experience. For career changers and recent graduates, place it higher; it may be the strongest section on the page.

7 Common Skills Section Mistakes

Copy-Paste Skills Sections by Industry

Every block below is a complete, ready-to-adapt skills section. Copy the one closest to your field, then swap in the tools and credentials named in your target job posting. The sub-heading labels matter as much as the skills themselves: they are what makes a parser and a recruiter read the section in the same order.

Software Engineer / Data Engineer

Data Analyst

Marketing Manager

Project Manager

Healthcare / Clinical

Operations / Supply Chain

Finance and Accounting

Sales

Education

Engineering (Mechanical / Civil)

Customer Service / Support

Before and After: Skills Section Makeovers

The difference between a skills section that gets filtered and one that ranks is rarely the number of skills. It is specificity and grouping. Both makeovers below keep roughly the same skill count.

Makeover 1: Marketing Manager

Makeover 2: Data Analyst

Skills for a Resume by Experience Level

The same job title calls for a different skills mix depending on where you are in your career. Entry-level candidates are screened on tools and trainability; senior candidates are screened on scope and judgement.

The career-changer row is the one people get wrong most often. If you managed budgets in nonprofit work and you are moving into operations, write "budget management" and "vendor negotiation", not "grant stewardship". Same skill, different keyword, and only one of them matches the posting.

How Many Skills to List and Where to Put Them

List 8 to 12. Below 6 the section looks thin and gives the parser too little to match; above 15 it reads as padding and dilutes the keywords that matter. If you have more than 12 genuinely relevant skills, group them under sub-headings so the section stays scannable.

Proficiency levels: when to include them

Add a proficiency qualifier only where it is genuinely informative and verifiable: languages ("Spanish, professional working proficiency"), and technical skills where the gap between basic and advanced is large ("Excel, advanced: pivot tables, Power Query, VBA"). Never rate soft skills. A five-star graphic next to "communication" tells a recruiter nothing and does not parse.

How Resume Optimizer Pro Extracts and Matches Skills

Manually comparing your skills against a job posting is useful but slow, and it is easy to miss synonyms and keyword variants. Resume Optimizer Pro parses the job description for every explicit and implicit skill requirement, then compares them against your resume at the keyword level.

The engine scores the skills section on four dimensions: coverage (how many of the posting's named skills appear on your resume), phrasing match (whether you used the posting's exact term or a synonym a parser will not connect), placement (whether skills also appear in your work experience bullets, which is what separates a claimed skill from an evidenced one), and parse integrity (whether the section survives text extraction, or whether tables, columns, and icons scramble it).

The most common failure we see is the phrasing gap rather than a missing skill. A resume says "customer relationship management" and the posting says "Salesforce"; a resume says "data visualisation" and the posting says "Tableau". The skill is real and the match is still missed, because keyword matching does not reason about synonyms the way a human reader does.

The output is a match percentage plus a prioritized list of skills to add, with the exact phrasing taken from the posting. So you do not just learn that a skill is missing; you learn the precise term to add and where to put it.

Frequently Asked Questions