How to Write the Skills Section on a Resume

Use three to five groups with labels from your field. A flat list of thirty terms is harder to read, and labelled groups give a parser cleaner values to extract. Put the section directly below your summary, as the resume structure guide recommends.

The ATS checker notes when your skills are not grouped under category labels.

List roughly 10 to 25. With very few, you match fewer searches; with many more, the important terms are harder to find. The ATS checker warns below 6 skills and above 40.

Before you add a skill, ask yourself whether you could answer a detailed interview question about it. If not, leave it out.

Start from the posting, not from everything you know. Then use this order:

If you have far more than 25, you are probably listing tools you used once. Keep them in a master copy of your resume and add them back when a posting asks for them. The tailoring guide explains how to keep a master copy.

Tools, languages, systems, methods and certifications can be checked, so list them. Traits such as "communication" or "leadership" are claims anyone can make. Show them in a bullet instead, for example "Trained 30 store managers on a new returns policy in weekly sessions".

If a posting uses a specific phrase such as "stakeholder management" and it describes your work, use that phrase.

The groups below show what a skills section can look like in different fields. Use them to check that you have not missed a common tool. Do not copy a list: include only what you have used. Items marked (India) apply mainly to jobs in India.

For a role outside these families, collect three to five postings for the job and note the tools and methods that appear in most of them. The resume keywords guide describes this method in more detail.

Write a tool the way the industry writes it, and include the version or module when it changes what you can do: "SAP FICO" says more than "SAP", and "Excel (Power Query, pivot tables)" says more than "Excel". For a term with a common abbreviation, write both once, such as "Goods and Services Tax (GST)".

Separate skills with commas or a middle dot, not with icons or rating bars, so each one comes out as plain text when the file is read. Within each group, put the skills the posting stresses first, since a reader skimming the line takes in the first few names.

These entries take space without helping you. The resume mistakes guide covers similar problems in the rest of the resume.

Where you have a skill the posting names, write it the way the posting does. The keywords guide explains why, and the Job Description Matcher lists the skills from a posting that your resume does not show. For the sections around your skills, browse the resume guides.