How to List Skills on a Resume (With Examples)

The skills section of your resume serves two audiences simultaneously: the ATS software that parses your document for keyword matches and the human recruiter who skims it for relevance. Getting this section right can meaningfully improve your callback rate. Getting it wrong -- by listing irrelevant skills, using the wrong format, or burying critical keywords -- can cost you interviews you are fully qualified for. It is one of the easiest sections to fix and one of the most commonly mishandled.

This guide covers the distinction between hard and soft skills, how ATS systems actually read your skills section, three formatting approaches with examples, industry-specific skill lists, and a catalog of skills you should never include. If you want to test how well your current skills section matches a specific job description, Vivid Resume's free scanner (/resume-score) will show you the gaps in seconds.

Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills: What to Include and Where

Hard skills are teachable, measurable abilities: programming languages, software proficiency, certifications, foreign languages, lab techniques, equipment operation. Soft skills are interpersonal and behavioral: leadership, communication, problem-solving, adaptability, conflict resolution. Both matter for getting hired, but they belong in different places on your resume and serve different purposes.

Your dedicated skills section should be overwhelmingly hard skills. These are the keywords ATS systems match against job descriptions, and they are the concrete qualifications recruiters scan for when they need to quickly assess whether you have the technical foundation for the role. Soft skills, on the other hand, are better demonstrated through your experience bullets than listed in a section. "Leadership" sitting in a skills list means nothing -- it is an unverifiable claim. "Led a 12-person team through a product launch that generated $2M in first-quarter revenue" means everything -- it proves leadership through a specific outcome.

The exception is when the job description explicitly lists soft skills as requirements. If a posting says "must demonstrate strong cross-functional collaboration," including "Cross-Functional Collaboration" in your skills section is reasonable -- but only if you also back it up with a bullet elsewhere on your resume. Think of the skills section as a keyword index and your experience section as the evidence that supports it.

How ATS Systems Read Your Skills

ATS platforms like Greenhouse, Lever, and Workday parse your resume into structured fields. The skills section gets mapped to a "skills" or "qualifications" field in the candidate profile. When a recruiter searches for candidates with specific skills, the ATS queries this field. If your skill is buried in a paragraph of text in your cover letter but not in your resume's skills section, many ATS systems will miss it entirely.

This means you should list skills in a clearly labeled section -- "Skills," "Technical Skills," or "Core Competencies" -- not hidden in prose paragraphs or buried in a summary statement. Use the exact terminology from the job description. If the posting says "Salesforce" do not write "CRM software." If it says "Python" do not write "programming." If it says "Adobe Creative Suite" do not write "design tools." For a deeper dive into how ATS parsing works, see our guide on how to beat ATS in 2026 (/blog/how-to-beat-ats-2026).

One common mistake is listing skills only in the skills section and nowhere else. The strongest approach is to mention a skill in your skills section for ATS indexing and also weave it into at least one experience bullet for human credibility. When a recruiter sees "Tableau" in your skills list and then reads a bullet that says "Built executive dashboards in Tableau tracking 14 KPIs across 3 business units," the skill becomes believable in a way that a standalone keyword never can.

Three Formatting Options (With Examples)

There is no single correct way to format a skills section. The best format depends on your industry, experience level, and the number of skills you need to include. Here are three approaches that work well with both ATS parsers and human readers.

Option 1: Categorized List

Best for technical roles, engineering, data science, and IT where you have a large number of tools and technologies to list. Categories make it scannable and help the recruiter quickly find the specific skills they care about.

• Languages: Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, R, Go

• Frameworks: Django, React, Next.js, FastAPI, Pandas

• Cloud: AWS (S3, Lambda, EC2, RDS), GCP (BigQuery, Cloud Functions)

• Data: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Snowflake, dbt

• Tools: Git, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Datadog, GitHub Actions

Option 2: Two-Column Flat List

Best for business, marketing, finance, and operations roles with a mix of tools and domain knowledge. This format is clean and works well when your skills span multiple categories but you do not have enough in any single category to justify subheadings.

• HubSpot / Marketo / Salesforce / Google Analytics 4 / Tableau

• SEO / SEM / Content Strategy / Marketing Automation / A/B Testing

• Budget Management / Vendor Negotiation / P&L Analysis / Forecasting

Option 3: Inline With Proficiency

Best for roles where depth of expertise matters, such as language proficiency, specialized certifications, or tools where the difference between basic and advanced knowledge is significant.

• Spanish (Professional Working Proficiency) / French (Elementary)

• CPA (Active) / CFA Level II Candidate

• Revit (Advanced) / AutoCAD (Intermediate) / SketchUp (Basic)

Skills to Never Include

Some skills actively hurt your resume by signaling that you are padding the section or are out of touch with current expectations. Remove any of the following if they appear on your resume. Every one of them either wastes space, dates your resume, or undermines your credibility.

• Microsoft Word / Microsoft Office: This is assumed for virtually every white-collar role in 2026. Listing it signals that you do not have more relevant skills to include. The only exception is if you have advanced Excel skills (pivot tables, VLOOKUP, macros) -- list "Advanced Excel" or "Excel (VBA, Pivot Tables)" instead.

• Email: Same as above. Every professional uses email. Listing it is like listing "breathing" as a skill.

• "Hard worker" / "Team player" / "Detail-oriented": These are personality traits, not skills. They cannot be measured, they add nothing to an ATS scan, and every candidate claims them.

• Typing speed: Unless you are applying for a data entry, transcription, or court reporting role, your typing speed is irrelevant to the hiring decision.

• Social media (personal): Managing your personal Instagram is not a professional skill. If you managed a brand's social presence with measurable results, that is a different story -- but list the specific platforms, tools, and outcomes you used.

• Outdated technologies: Flash, FrontPage, Windows XP, Visual Basic 6, Dreamweaver. If the technology has been deprecated for years, listing it dates your resume without adding value. It suggests you have not kept your skills current.

Industry-Specific Skills That Hiring Managers Look For

The skills that get you interviews depend heavily on your industry. Here are high-value skills for five common fields based on patterns in current job postings. Use these as a starting point and customize based on the specific roles you are targeting.

Software Engineering

• Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) with specific services listed, not just the vendor name

• CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, ArgoCD)

• Containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm)

• Observability and monitoring (Datadog, Grafana, PagerDuty, New Relic)

• Infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation)

Marketing

• Marketing automation (HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Klaviyo)

• Analytics (GA4, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Looker)

• Paid media (Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, TikTok Ads)

• SEO tools (Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, Surfer SEO)

Healthcare

• EHR systems (Epic, Cerner, Meditech, Allscripts)

• Certifications (BLS, ACLS, CCRN, PALS, CEN)

• Clinical protocols and regulatory compliance (HIPAA, Joint Commission, CMS)

• Patient assessment tools and scoring systems (Braden, Morse Fall Scale, NEWS2)

Finance

• Financial modeling (DCF, LBO, Comparable Analysis, Monte Carlo simulation)

• ERP systems (SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Workday Financials)

• Data and visualization tools (SQL, Tableau, Power BI, Adaptive Insights)

• Certifications (CPA, CFA, FRM, CAIA)

Project Management

• Methodologies (Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, SAFe)

• Tools (Jira, Asana, Monday.com, Smartsheet, Notion)

• Certifications (PMP, CSM, CSPO, SAFe Agilist)

• Risk management and stakeholder communication frameworks

Your skills section is not a place to dump every capability you have ever developed. It is a targeted keyword list designed to get you past the ATS and signal relevance to the recruiter. Audit it for every application: remove anything generic, add anything the job description specifically asks for, and make sure every skill listed is one you can discuss confidently in an interview. A skills section that is tailored to each role takes five minutes to adjust and can make the difference between getting screened in or filtered out.