Skills for a resume
Written by the Bespree Team. Updated September 22, 2026.
A skills section helps readers find what you can do. This guide covers what to include, where to put it, and examples across six job families. Choose the skills that match your experience and the role you want.
What a skills section is for
A skills section is an index, not an argument. Its job is to make the concrete things you can do easy to find, both for a person skimming and for the search a recruiter runs over a database of applicants. The argument lives in your experience bullets, where you show the skill in use.
Include skills relevant to the role that you can describe accurately. They may come from paid work, study, projects, volunteering or responsibilities at home.
Keep the list focused on the role. Eight to fifteen entries can be a useful starting point, but the right length depends on which skills are relevant.
Hard skills, soft skills and which belong on the page
Hard skills are the ones with a name: a system, a language, a certification, a method, a piece of equipment. They are what a posting lists under requirements, and they are what a database search matches, so they carry almost all of the weight in a skills section.
Soft skills include communication, teamwork and handling difficult situations. Name those relevant to the role and, where you can, show how you used them in your experience or projects.
So name one or two behavioural strengths if they are genuinely the core of the role, and prove the rest inside your experience bullets. 'Took the escalated calls for a team of nine' is a de-escalation claim that survives scrutiny. The words 'excellent communication skills' are not.
Where skills belong on a resume
- In a reverse-chronological resume, a short skills section below experience. The jobs carry the argument, so they go first.
- In a hybrid layout, a four to eight line skills block above experience, with anything else lower down. The resume format guide compares the layouts.
- Use real text and a clear reading order. Graphics, rating bars and decorative text boxes may not carry through correctly when a system extracts the text.
- Grouped with plain labels when the list runs long: tools on one line, certifications on another, languages on a third.
- Licences and certifications a job requires go near the top of the page, not buried in a skills list. A required licence is a filter criterion.
- Never in two places with different contents. One list, kept consistent with the bullets underneath it.
Skills by role family
Take the specific entries, not the whole list. Where a role has a full sample resume on Bespree, the link goes to it.
Customer service and retail
See the full samples for customer service representative, cashier and customer service manager.
Name the system
- Your help desk platform by name: Zendesk, Freshdesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Intercom.
- The point-of-sale system you used: Square, Toast, Oracle Micros, Lightspeed.
- Order management, returns and exchange processing.
- Payment handling, refunds and drawer reconciliation.
- Live chat and email queue work against a service-level target.
- A second language you actually used with customers, with a level.
Worth naming once
- De-escalation of escalated or angry contacts.
- Case notes clear enough for the next agent to act on.
- Training new hires on the register or the help desk.
Food service and hospitality
See the full samples for server, fine dining server and housekeeper.
Name the system
- Food handler card, allergen awareness and food safety certification, with the issuing body.
- Table management and ordering systems: Toast, Micros, OpenTable, Resy.
- Wine, beer and cocktail service, and any sommelier or bartending certification.
- Par-sheet prep, inventory counts and waste logs.
- Opening and closing checklists, cash-out and bank deposits.
- Brand inspection standards and room turn procedures for housekeeping.
Worth naming once
- Running a station or a section through a rush.
- Handling allergy and dietary requests accurately.
- Coursing a table so plates land together.
Healthcare and care work
See the full samples for registered nurse and certified nursing assistant.
Name the system
- Relevant qualifications, using their exact names: a licence, certification or completed training. Include the issuing body and location where applicable.
- BLS, ACLS, PALS or CPR certification, with the current expiry.
- The electronic health record you chart in: Epic, Cerner, PointClickCare, Athenahealth.
- Vital signs, intake and output, and charting to a care plan.
- Safe transfers, mechanical lift and sit-to-stand equipment.
- Clinical tasks inside your scope: phlebotomy, point-of-care testing, medication administration, wound care.
Worth naming once
- Clear handover notes covering the information the next shift needs.
- Explaining a procedure to a frightened patient or a family member.
- Escalating a change in condition promptly.
Warehouse, transport and facilities
See the full samples for warehouse associate, delivery driver and security officer.
Name the system
- Forklift certification by class: sit-down, stand-up, reach, order picker.
- Driving licence class and endorsements, and your accident record if it is clean.
- Radio-frequency scanners and the warehouse management system you used.
- Pre-trip inspections, vehicle condition reports and hours-of-service rules.
- Pallet building, load planning and bill of lading paperwork.
- Safety certifications the job asks for: OSHA 10 or 30, EPA Section 608, state security guard licence.
Worth naming once
- Working to a pick rate without losing accuracy.
- Cycle counting and inventory accuracy.
- Incident reports a client can use.
Technology and data
See the full samples for software engineer and data analyst.
Name the system
- Languages you would be happy to be tested on, with the ones you use daily first.
- Frameworks and runtimes: React, Next.js, Django, Spring, Node.
- SQL, and the database or warehouse you query: Postgres, BigQuery, Snowflake.
- Cloud and infrastructure: AWS, Google Cloud, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker.
- Testing and delivery: Jest, Playwright, pytest, GitHub Actions.
- Analysis and reporting: Looker, Tableau, dbt, pandas, spreadsheets at a modelling level.
Worth naming once
- Code review that catches design problems rather than style.
- On-call and incident response.
- Turning a vague request into a written specification.
Business, finance, marketing and education
See the full samples for marketing manager, accountant, project manager, teacher and graphic designer.
Name the system
- Accounting and ERP systems you have closed a month in: NetSuite, SAP, QuickBooks, Xero.
- CRM and marketing automation: Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Braze.
- Analytics and reporting: GA4, Looker Studio, attribution you have actually configured.
- Project tooling and the method you run: Jira, Asana, Microsoft Project, Scrum, Kanban, PMP.
- Design tools and design systems: Figma, Illustrator, InDesign, Adobe Creative Suite.
- For teaching: the standards you plan to, your assessment tools, your certification area and grade band, and the learning platform by name.
Worth naming once
- Budget ownership, with the figure.
- Coaching and formal performance feedback.
- Working to an audit or accreditation standard.
How to prove a skill instead of listing it
A list says you claim a skill. A bullet shows it. Strong resumes do both: the list makes the claim findable, and one bullet somewhere on the page backs up each claim that matters.
- Claim: spreadsheets. Evidence: 'Rebuilt the weekly staffing model with lookup formulas so shift leads could edit it without breaking it.'
- Claim: de-escalation. Evidence: 'Took the escalated calls for a team of nine and closed most of them without a supervisor.'
- Claim: forklift certified. Evidence: 'Operated a reach truck in cold storage for four years with no recordable incidents.'
- Claim: SQL. Evidence: 'Wrote the queries behind the weekly revenue dashboard around 40 people read.'
- Claim: bilingual. Evidence: 'Handled the Spanish-language queue, roughly a third of daily contact volume.'
Think of a situation where you used each skill. Paid work is only one source: coursework, a project, volunteering or informal responsibilities can also provide an example. Describe your current level honestly. How to write a resume covers writing experience bullets.
Skills to drop
- Adjectives about yourself: hard working, motivated, detail oriented, passionate. Every applicant writes them, so they carry no information.
- Basic software skills that do not help explain your fit for the role. Keep them when the posting asks for them or when you can name relevant tasks, such as formatting documents or managing a shared inbox.
- Skills from a field you have left, unless the posting asks for them.
- Anything you could not answer two questions about.
- Rating bars and percentages. 'Python, 80 percent' means nothing to a reader and does not survive being parsed into text.
- A forty-item list with no grouping. Fifteen well-chosen entries read as expertise; forty read as a word cloud.
Match your list to the posting
A posting tells you which skills matter and roughly in what order. Read the requirements section and write down every tool, certification and method it names. Then compare it with your list, and add anything that is true and missing, using the posting's own words rather than a synonym.
Use the employer’s terms when they describe your experience accurately. Do not add a skill just to match the posting. If you are still learning it, state your level clearly.
In Bespree, the editor's Review screen can compare your resume against a job description you paste in and show which of the keywords it extracted appear in your text and which do not, with the missing ones offered as skills you can add. How to tailor a resume to a job description walks through that, and the ATS resume checker explains the structure and content checks that run alongside it.
Frequently asked questions
How many skills should I list on a resume?
Choose the skills most relevant to the role. Eight to fifteen can be a useful starting point, but there is no required count. Group a longer list under clear labels so it is easy to scan.
Should I separate hard and soft skills?
Separate the concrete from the behavioural if it helps a reader scan, but keep the behavioural list to one or two entries. The rest belong in your experience bullets, where you can show the behaviour rather than assert it.
Where does the skills section go on a resume?
Below experience in a reverse-chronological resume, or as a short block above experience in a hybrid layout when the job is defined by its tool list. Either way keep it as plain text in the main column.
Do I need to list every piece of software I have used?
No. List what the job asks for and what you could use confidently on day one. A long tail of tools you touched once dilutes the ones that matter.
How do I show skills with no work experience?
Name where you used them: coursework, a project, volunteering, a family business, a certification. 'Built a twelve-page site in Figma and HTML for a neighbourhood association' is evidence. 'Web design' on its own is not.
Write it in Bespree
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