How to write a CV skills section (and which skills actually matter)

The skills section is the most abused part of a CV. It is easy to fill and hard to disprove, so people fill it with everything they have ever touched. A recruiter reads a list of twenty-five skills and concludes that none of them is deep.

Do the opposite. Fewer skills, each one defensible.

Three kinds of skill, three jobs

Technical skills — the specific tools, systems, software, methods and certifications of your trade. Excel, SAP, Python, Figma, GA4, HACCP, CIPD, PRINCE2, Spanish (B2). These are the ones a recruiter searches for, so use the exact standard name.

Professional skills — the things you do at work that have a name in your sector: financial modelling, stakeholder management, curriculum design, clinical assessment, procurement negotiation.

Transferable skills — the ones that carry across roles: communication, leadership, problem solving, organisation. These are the most claimed and the least believed. They only earn space when attached to evidence.

How many to list

Six to ten. A short list signals judgement; a long list signals padding. If the advert names a skill you genuinely have, it must appear. If it names one you do not, let the gap be a gap.

Group them so they can be scanned

Three small groups read faster than one long column:

• Systems and tools: Excel (advanced), Power BI, Salesforce, Xero
• Methods: Lean Six Sigma, root cause analysis, capacity planning
• Languages: French (fluent), German (conversational)

Evidence beats adjectives

Anyone can write "excellent communication". Almost nobody writes "presented quarterly results to the board and wrote the reports the sales team used in client meetings".

Weak: Leadership, teamwork, time management, attention to detail, Microsoft Office. Strong: Team leadership — managed 11 staff across two shifts, including rotas, training and appraisals.

If a soft skill matters to the job, put it in a bullet point under a role where you demonstrated it, and leave the skills list for the things that are genuinely listable.

What to leave out

• Anything you would not want to be tested on in the interview.
• "Microsoft Word" and "email" in a professional role.
• Skill bars, percentages, star ratings and traffic-light graphics.
• A second list repeating the same skills in different words.
• Languages with no level ("Spanish") — say fluent, conversational, basic, or give the CEFR level.

Skills for specific situations

Career changer: list the skills that transfer plus the ones you have newly trained in, and show where you used them. A retraining certificate with a project attached is worth more than a claim.

Graduate or student: coursework, dissertations, society roles, part-time jobs and volunteering all produce real skills. "Treasurer for a 120-member society, managed a £4,000 budget" belongs in a skills section as much as in experience.

Returning after a break: list your professional skills plainly, and put recent evidence next to them — a course, freelance work, volunteering, a project. Recency reassures more than volume.

Technical role: be precise about depth. "Python (pandas, NumPy — used for monthly reporting)" tells a hiring manager more than "Python, Java, C++, SQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript".

The two-minute edit

Take your current skills list and delete every item you could not discuss for two minutes if an interviewer pointed at it. What remains is your skills section. If fewer than six remain, that is useful information about where to spend the next month, not a reason to add the ones you deleted back.

If you want a second pair of eyes on whether your list matches what your market searches for, the improver will rephrase your own skills using standard industry wording, and show you the result before you pay.