Make Your Resume Skills Section Great

Best skills to list on your resume in 2023

If you’re wondering, what are some skills to put on a resume? The answer is — it depends. Good skills to list on your resume are specific to your background and the role you seek.

The skills on your resume should be targeted to the job you want. If the job requires working with customers, then your resume should mention polite and courteous communication. If you stare at charts all day, you better highlight your ability to interpret data.

While some skills are industry-specific, many are universally in demand. Here are 10 basic resume skills every job seeker should consider:

Many of the skills listed above are soft skills. But hard skills are just as necessary. How do they differ?

Soft skills versus hard skills

Understanding the difference between hard and soft skills — or core competencies — will help you round out your resume. When figuring out the best skills to list on a resume, you want to include skills from both categories.

Here are a few of the top skills to include on your resume.

Skills to Highlight on a Resume

If you want to go deeper on the distinction between the two, check out our detailed guide on soft skills vs. hard skills.

Now let’s check out some of the skills required in specific industries.

159 good skills to list on a resume [by industry]

We’ve covered the skills employers universally desire. But what about those technical skills that are demanded in specific industries? Some say they’re even more critical because they’re often core to the job.

Let’s see which skills to list on your resume in these vital industries:

Don’t see what you’re looking for? Try the skills library in our Resume Builder. Enter your job title and voila! You’ll find hundreds of resume-ready skills.

Administrative resume skills

Being responsible for your own schedule is challenging enough — taking charge of someone else’s is even harder. Here are excellent job skills for a resume aimed at landing an administrative job:

Accounting resume skills examples

Accountants use dozens of skills on a daily basis. Some are highly transferable, but many are specific to the industry. These are among the top accounting job skills for your resume:

Banking resume skills

Banking is a cornerstone of society. From keeping money secure and processing loans to satisfying customers, banking requires many diverse skills. Here are a few skills to consider putting on your banking resume:

Child care resume skills

Child care skills are critical for anyone working with kids, whether you’re a babysitter or overseeing the day-to-day operations of a day care. Hiring managers will want to know if you can take care of the following:

Customer service skills

Make your job search more successful by adding exemplary customer service skills to your resume. Some of the top contenders include:

Food service resume skills examples

Working in kitchens — whether you’re in the fanciest restaurant or a typical fast food chain — requires much more than ringing up orders and flipping burgers. Here are just a few of the food service skills that would make your resume more appetizing:

Graphic design resume skills

Include these skills on your resume when you want to impress employers and stand out from other candidates:

Housekeeping resume skills

If part of your job involves tidying, then the housekeeping skills listed below may apply to you. Housekeeping skills are a great addition to your resume when you’re trying to show a potential employer you can clean pretty much anything.

Marketing skills examples

Any marketing professional should have the latest in-demand marketing skills. Consider adding these to your resume when you’re looking for your next job:

Nursing skills examples

If you’ve worked in nursing, you know what it’s like to hone your skills under pressure. From showing compassion to patients, to communicating with the care team, nurses have an expansive, impressive skill set. Consider adding these nursing skills to your resume:

Retail resume skills examples

Add these retail skills to your resume to show you can address customer needs and talk fluently about products and services:

Sales resume skills examples

Sales is more than talking a good game. You must make customers feel heard and appreciated while keeping the business goals in mind. Here are a few skills to add to your sales resume:

Warehousing resume skills examples

If you work in a warehouse, you need to represent your talents successfully. Put these skills on your resume to show you are capable of handling inventory:

How to put job skills on a resume

Now that you have a solid job skills list, you’re ready to add the skills to your resume. The process only takes four steps. Here’s a tried-and-true approach:

If you only take one thing away from this article, it should be this: customize your resume skills for every application to target the job you want. The skills on your resume should always match the skills in the job listing.

How do you align your resume with the job? Read the job description closely. Then highlight or underline every skill in the post.

Take this insurance sales agent job description, for example, to see how we’ve highlighted the skills:

After you’ve highlighted skills in the job description, what the employer wants will be more apparent than ever. Now you can begin adding the skills they’re looking for to your resume. You can list the skills in their own section plus add them to the resume profile and work history section using action verbs. Doing so makes your resume stronger because it shows employers how you have utilized each of the skills you listed.

Every resume has a skills section. In this section, you can list the skills most relevant to the job.

When you add skills to this section, keep five things in mind:

• Be succinct. There’s no established number of skills to include in the skills section of a resume, but since you have limited space to work with, aim for no more than 10.
• Be specific. Include pertinent details, such as adding “verbal communication,” “written communication,” or “verbal and written communication” instead of simply “communication.”
• Choose wisely. You have limited space to work with, so aim for maximum impact by being honest about your marketable strengths, matching them closely to the job and only adding the best of the bunch.
• Consider using subsections. Depending on the layout of your resume, you can differentiate and organize your skills into one list of crucial skills or divide your skills into two lists.
• Use bullet points. Using bullet points will not only help you keep your skills section short but also makes it easy for recruiters and hiring managers to scan for relevancy.

Here’s a skills section for a resume example:

Now, here are several mistakes you should avoid when writing your skills section:

Finally, if you need more guidance, check out some resume templates to see how skills sections vary in different resume styles, from simple and professional to creative and modern. CV templates are available as well. For advice on the best resume template for your role, use our guide to the Best Resume Templates for 2023.

Pro tip:The type of resume skills section you use will depend on your resume format. Chronological resumes, for example, focus on work history and only have one section dedicated to skills. Functional resumes are much more skills-focused and have as many as two to three skills sections. Combination resumes try to balance skills and work experience.

Listing your skills is great, but to make your candidacy more appealing, you need to demonstrate how you’ve applied those skills in previous jobs.

The best way to showcase the skills you’ve honed in the workplace is to write strong bullet points in your work experience section. The work history section of your resume should be brimming with skills and accomplishments.

Each bullet point should include at least one relevant skill plus a quantifiable achievement to show that you achieved results. Hard numbers speak for themselves.

Here’s an example taken from the resume of an applicant interested in the insurance job mentioned earlier:

As the example illustrates, every bullet point shows the results of having a skilled employee. This candidate not only “develops leads,” she “drives sales by 35%.” Language like this connects to the employer’s bottom line.

If insurance sales isn’t your arena, there are hundreds of additional work bullet points to sample in our libraries of resume examples and CV examples. Feel free to copy, paste and customize them to meet your needs.

The final place to highlight your skills is in your resume profile — the career summary near the top of your resume. Since this is a prominent position, you’ll want to mention the overarching skills that define your career.

Here are two different approaches to the career profile. The first is a professional summary, which should encapsulate your career highlights in three to four sentences.

Here’s an example of an auto mechanic who recently finished school (skills are highlighted):

The second approach is to write a resume objective, where you can showcase your intentions by stating precisely what you are seeking. While an objective functions a bit differently than a career summary, they both advertise skills in a similar way.

Here’s an example of a sales associate looking for a management position:

Add a cover letter to emphasize your skills

Your resume isn’t the only avenue you have for showcasing your skill set. Writing a strong cover letter gives you the opportunity to elaborate on your skills and provide concrete examples of how you have used them to generate positive results.

Use our guide to learn how to write a cover letter or consider using our Cover Letter Builder to get the job done in a matter of minutes. Our builder offers professionally designed cover letter templates and section-by-section text suggestions to ensure your cover letter is well-written and full of the critical skills employers look for in top applicants.