Which skills to put on a resume

The skills section is the most padded part of most resumes. Done well it is a fast index of what you can do unsupervised. Done badly it is a word cloud.

The test for including a skill

Could you be handed a task using this, alone, on your first week, and produce something usable? If yes, list it. If you would need to look up the basics first, leave it off or describe it honestly elsewhere.

This one test removes most of the padding. It also protects you in the interview, where a listed skill is fair game for questioning.

Group them, do not just pile them

A flat list of thirty items is unreadable. Two to four labelled groups reads in seconds:

• Technical: SQL, Advanced Excel, Power BI, Python (pandas)
• Operations: Process mapping, vendor management, demand forecasting
• Languages: English (fluent), Hindi (native), German (basic)

Delete the rating bars

Skill bars, star ratings and percentage dials are common in modern templates and they are a bad trade. They take significant space to communicate a number you awarded yourself, they mean nothing consistent between candidates, and many of them are drawn as images or shapes that a parser cannot read at all. Where they are read, "Python 80%" tells a hiring manager less than "Python (pandas, three years)".

Soft skills

Listing "communication" and "teamwork" adds nothing — every applicant claims them and none of them are checkable. Soft skills belong in your experience bullets, where they come with evidence attached.

Instead of "Leadership" in a skills list, a bullet that reads "Led a process review across three hubs and got two reluctant site managers to adopt it" shows the same thing and cannot be copied by someone who did not do it.

Match the words in the posting — if they are true

If the advert says "stakeholder management" and you have been doing exactly that but calling it "working with the business", use their phrase. You are not gaming anything; you are removing a translation step for the reader and the search.

What you must not do is add terms you cannot back up. Keyword stuffing gets you through a filter and caught in an interview, which is a worse outcome than not being shortlisted.

Keep it current

Drop software that dates you unhelpfully unless the role asks for it. Keep versions off unless they matter — "Excel" not "Excel 2019", but "Python 3" is worth saying if the codebase is old.

How many

Between eight and twenty items, grouped. Below eight the section looks thin; above twenty nobody reads to the end and the strong entries get diluted by the weak ones.

Common questions