The skills the job ad asks for that your experience can prove: technical skills and tools, languages with a level, and two or three transversal skills such as analytical thinking, each backed by a result somewhere in the resume. A skill that appears only in a list is a claim. A skill that also appears in a bullet is evidence.
Everyone lists "communication". Few people show it.
What Are Skills to Put on a Resume?
The skills to put on a resume are the ones that match the job and that you can demonstrate, grouped so a reader finds them in seconds. In practice they fall into five groups:
- Technical and professional skills: what you can do in your field, such as financial modelling, CNC programming or clinical documentation.
- Tools and software: named products and versions, such as SAP S/4HANA, Python, AutoCAD or Salesforce.
- Languages: each one with a level, ideally on the CEFR scale from A1 to C2.
- Transversal skills: abilities that travel between jobs, such as analytical thinking, leadership or resilience.
- Certifications and licences: proof issued by someone else, such as PMP, ACCA or a driving licence when the job needs it.
The European Commission's ESCO classification, which maps skills across European labour markets, holds 13,939 skill concepts in version 1.2.1. Nobody needs more than a dozen on one page. The work is choosing.
How Do Recruiters Evaluate the Skills on a Resume?
Recruiters check whether the skills in the list match the job ad and whether the rest of the resume backs them up. A skills section is read as a table of contents for the experience below it. If the two disagree, the experience wins.
| What the recruiter checks | Weak signal | Strong signal |
|---|---|---|
| Match with the ad | Twenty generic skills, three of them relevant | Eight to twelve skills, most named in the ad |
| Evidence | "Leadership" in the list, no team mentioned anywhere | "Led a team of six" in a bullet, leadership in the list |
| Precision | "MS Office", "IT skills", "fluent English" | "Excel (Power Query, pivot tables)", "English C1" |
| Currency | A tool the industry dropped years ago, listed first | Current tools first, older ones only if the ad asks |
The scoring logic is plain. Every skill in the list is a promise; every bullet either keeps it or breaks it. A short list that the experience fully supports reads stronger than a long one that it does not.
Which Types of Skills Belong on a Resume?
Hard skills and tools carry most of the weight, languages need a level, and soft skills belong on the page only when a bullet proves them. The table shows how each type is best written.
| Skill type | Weak version | Strong version |
|---|---|---|
| Technical skill | "Data analysis" | "Data analysis: SQL, cohort analysis, A/B test evaluation" |
| Tool | "Accounting software" | "DATEV, SAP FI" |
| Language | "German: good" | "German B2 (CEFR), English C1" |
| Transversal skill | "Team player" | "Stakeholder management", shown in a bullet about a cross-team project |
| Certification | "Project management training" | "PMP (PMI), 2024" |
ESCO sorts its skills pillar into four groups: knowledge, language skills and knowledge, skills, and transversal skills. That split is a useful test for your own list. If everything you wrote is transversal, the list says little about what you can actually do.
Which Skills Do Employers Say They Want Most?
Employers rank analytical thinking as the top core skill: in the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, seven out of ten companies called it essential. The same report lists the top five core skills in this order:
- Analytical thinking
- Resilience, flexibility and agility
- Leadership and social influence
- Creative thinking
- Motivation and self-awareness
The report also states that employers expect 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030.
Two warnings before you copy this list. First, these are employer survey results about the workforce, not a checklist for a single resume. Second, every item on it is easy to claim and hard to verify. "Analytical thinking" in a skills list proves nothing. "Found a pricing error in the quarterly data that had cost the region two months of margin" proves it without naming it.
How Do You Choose Skills From the Job Ad?
Take the skills from the ad, keep the ones you can prove, and write them in the ad's words. The job ad is the closest thing to an answer key you will get.
- Underline every skill, tool and language in the ad. Requirements listed first or repeated usually matter most.
- Sort them into three columns: proven in my resume, true but not yet shown, not true.
- Use the ad's spelling. If the ad says "stakeholder management", do not write "managing stakeholders" in one place and "liaising with partners" in another.
- Add the evidence. Every skill from column two needs a bullet before it goes into the list.
- Leave column three out. A missing skill is a gap you can discuss. An invented one is a problem you cannot.
For role-by-role lists of the skills that typically appear in job ads, our resume skills database groups them by field.
Where Should Skills Go on a Resume?
Skills belong in three places: a short skills section, the bullets under each role, and, for the most important two or three, the profile at the top.
- Skills section: a compact block, grouped by type (for example: Tools, Languages, Certifications). Plain text, separated by commas or short lines.
- Experience bullets: where each skill gets its proof. The skill can be named or simply visible in what you did.
- Profile or summary: two or three lines that name your field, level and the strongest skills for this job.
For most experienced professionals, the skills section sits after the experience. For students, career changers and technical roles, it often moves higher, because the skills are the strongest part of the story.
How Do You Format a CV Skills Section?
A CV skills section works best as a short, single-column block of labelled lines, such as "Tools:", "Methods:" and "Languages:", written as plain text under a standard heading. The same rules apply whether you call the document a CV or a resume.
| Element | Do | Avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Heading | "Skills" or "Key skills" | Creative labels such as "My toolbox" or "Superpowers" |
| Layout | One label per line, items separated by commas | Skill clouds, icons, or logos instead of names |
| Order within a line | The item the ad stresses most comes first | Alphabetical order, which buries what matters |
| Column | The main text column | A narrow sidebar the reader has to hunt through |
| Length | Four to six lines | A block longer than the experience it summarises |
Two-column templates look tidy, and they are a common source of formatting trouble. When software extracts the text from a two-column PDF, the sidebar can land after the main column, in the middle of it, or nowhere at all.
A one-minute test shows how your own file behaves. Open the PDF, select all the text and paste it into a plain text editor. If your skills arrive as one readable block, the section is safe. If they turn up scattered between job titles, move the section into the main column.
Before and After: One Skills Section, Rewritten
Grouping skills by type and naming tools and levels makes a skills section shorter and easier to check. Here is one section for a supply chain analyst role.
Before:
- Communication, teamwork, problem solving, MS Office, hard-working, analytical, ERP, English fluent, German basic, flexible, detail-oriented, reporting
After:
- Tools: SAP MM, Excel (Power Query, pivot tables), Power BI
- Methods: demand forecasting, inventory optimisation, supplier performance reporting
- Languages: English C1, German B1 (CEFR), Turkish native
- Certification: APICS CPIM, 2025
And one bullet in the experience section that backs the list:
- Rebuilt the weekly stock report in Power BI, which replaced four manual spreadsheets and gave buyers the same figures on the same day
The bullet and the certificate are illustrative; yours must be real and ready to explain in an interview.
Should You Rate Your Skills With Stars or Bars?
No, star ratings and progress bars should be left out: they cannot be compared between candidates and often do not survive parsing. Four stars out of five in Python means nothing to a reader who does not know your scale, and the graphic itself is usually lost when software reads the file.
Use words and recognised scales instead:
- Languages: the CEFR levels A1 to C2, or "native". The Council of Europe groups them into basic (A1, A2), independent (B1, B2) and proficient (C1, C2) users.
- Tools: name what you do with them ("Excel: Power Query, macros") rather than how many stars you give yourself.
- Experience: years of use, if they help ("Java, 6 years") and are accurate.
How Do Skills Work in a Lebenslauf for Germany, Austria and Switzerland?
In a DACH Lebenslauf, skills usually sit in a section called Kenntnisse (or Kenntnisse und Fähigkeiten), split into language skills, IT skills and specialist knowledge, each with a level. The format of the German CV as a whole is covered in our German CV guide. This section covers only the skills block.
| Lebenslauf section | What it holds | How the level is given |
|---|---|---|
| Sprachkenntnisse (language skills) | Every language, including your native one | CEFR level, for example "Deutsch B2", or "Muttersprache" |
| EDV-Kenntnisse / IT-Kenntnisse (IT skills) | Software and systems by name | Self-assessment in words, for example "sehr gute Anwenderkenntnisse" |
| Fachkenntnisse (specialist knowledge) | Methods, standards, regulations of the field | Named precisely, for example "HGB-Abschluss", "ISO 9001" |
| Weitere Kenntnisse (other) | Driving licence class, if relevant to the job | Licence class, for example "Führerschein Klasse B" |
The Austrian public employment service AMS describes the same convention in its 2021 guidance for application advisers: languages with a level on the European framework (for example B2) or a verbal description, and IT skills with the program name and a self-assessment of the level.
Two points matter for international applicants. Your German level is the skill a DACH reader checks first, so state it honestly with a CEFR level; overstating it is discovered in the first conversation. And soft skills listed on their own carry even less weight in a German-language CV, which tends to be read as a factual record. Let the experience section show them.
Do Skills Help With ATS Software?
Yes, skills help with ATS software when they are written as plain text in the ad's wording and repeated in context in the experience section. An applicant tracking system extracts text and lets recruiters search it. It does not reward a long list; it makes your resume findable for the terms a recruiter searches.
- Write skills as text, not inside images, icons or charts.
- Use the exact term from the ad, and the common abbreviation once if there is one ("Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)").
- Keep the skills section heading standard: "Skills", or "Kenntnisse" in a German Lebenslauf.
An ATS check such as TalentVP's compares your resume with a pasted job ad, reports how many of the ad's keywords it matches, and flags languages that have no CEFR level. A missing keyword is a question, not an instruction: add it only if it is true.
Why Is It Hard to Judge Your Own Skills Section?
You read your skills list with your whole career in mind, while the recruiter has only the page in front of them. "Project management" feels proven to you because you remember the project. The reader sees a word.
That gap is why self-review usually misses two things: skills that the experience never backs up, and strong skills that appear in a bullet but never make it into the list, where a recruiter or a search would look for them.
The fix is a cross-check. Read the skills section and, for each entry, point to the bullet that proves it. Then read the bullets and note every skill they demonstrate that the list does not mention. Doing this against a specific job ad is faster and more honest than doing it in the abstract.
Your 6-Step Plan for the Skills on Your Resume
- Collect the skills from the ad. Underline every skill, tool, language and certification.
- Sort by proof. Proven, true but not shown, not true.
- Write the missing evidence. One bullet for every true skill that has no proof yet.
- Group the list. Tools, methods, languages, certifications; eight to twelve entries are usually enough.
- Add levels where they mean something. CEFR for languages, concrete functions for tools, no stars.
- Adapt for the market. For DACH, use a Kenntnisse section with Sprachkenntnisse and EDV-Kenntnisse; for each new ad, reorder the list.
Bottom Line
A skill is a claim. A bullet is the proof.
What are skills to put on a resume? The ones the job asks for and your experience shows, in the ad's words, with a level where a level means something.
Fewer skills. More evidence.
Sources
- ESCO: Skills and competences, European Commission: 13,939 skills in ESCO v1.2.1, structured as knowledge, language skills and knowledge, skills, and transversal skills
- The Future of Jobs Report 2025: Skills outlook, World Economic Forum, 2025
- Common Reference Levels: global scale (CEFR, Table 1), Council of Europe
- Bewerbungsunterlagen: Tipps und Hilfestellungen, AMS Austria, May 2021
Related Guides
- Resume skills database, skills by field and by role
- German CV rules and format, the Lebenslauf structure in DACH
- Best font for a resume, type, size and the PDF check
- How long should a resume be, page rules by career stage
- Free ATS resume check, matched and missing keywords for one job ad
