How to Write the Skills Section of Your CV

The skills section of a CV is often either wasted space or an afterthought. Either it lists things so generic they add no signal ("good communicator", "team player"), or it tries to include everything and ends up as a keyword dump that a recruiter skims past in a second. Done well, it's the fastest part of your CV to improve, and it has a disproportionate effect on both ATS performance and the recruiter's first impression.

Why the Skills Section Matters

Applicant tracking systems often scan the skills section first when filtering CVs for keyword matches. If the specific terms from the job description don't appear in your CV, you may be filtered out before a human ever sees it. At the same time, the skills section is typically the first thing a recruiter glances at after your name and job title, because it lets them check basic fit in seconds. A strong skills section works for both audiences, the algorithm and the person.

Hard Skills vs Soft Skills

This is the single most important distinction to understand. Hard skills are specific, verifiable, and meaningful: Python, Adobe Illustrator, SQL, French B2, IFRS accounting, project management with PRINCE2 certification. Soft skills ("adaptable", "detail-oriented", "strong communicator") are claims that every candidate makes and that nobody can verify from a list. They add no information. Remove them from your skills section entirely, and instead let your experience bullet points demonstrate those qualities through concrete examples. Saying you "led a cross-functional team of eight to deliver a rebranding project on time" says far more about communication and teamwork than the word "team player" ever will.

How Many Skills to List

Eight to twelve is the right range for most roles. Fewer than eight tends to look sparse and can leave gaps in ATS keyword coverage. More than fifteen starts to read as a keyword dump, which recruiters notice and discount. If you have a lot of genuinely relevant skills, group them into two or three categories (Technical, Tools, Languages) to make the section readable rather than just trimming arbitrarily.

How to Choose Which Skills to Include

Go through the job description and note which skills appear more than once, or are listed under "essential requirements." Use those exact terms, not synonyms, because ATS systems match on precise strings. "Project management" and "managing projects" are not the same to a parser. If the job description says "Salesforce" and you write "CRM platforms", you'll likely miss the match. Once you've identified the must-haves from the job description, fill the remaining slots with skills that are strong, current, and demonstrable in conversation.

How to Organise the Section

If you have ten or fewer skills, a single row or column works fine. For more than that, grouping by type makes the section easier to read: Technical Skills, Languages, and Tools, for example. What to avoid is mixing genuinely different categories in a way that reveals muddled thinking, like grouping "empathy" and "Excel" as the same type of competency. The groupings should follow a logic a recruiter would recognise.

Proficiency Levels

Optional, but useful for languages and technical skills where the level of proficiency meaningfully changes what you can do. "French: C1" or "SQL: intermediate" gives real information. Avoid rating general skills on a five-star or bar-chart scale, because nobody can agree on what three stars out of five means for PowerPoint or Word. If you use levels, use standard frameworks for languages (CEFR: A1 to C2) and plain language for technical tools (basic, intermediate, advanced).

Tailoring for Each Application

The skills section should shift slightly for each role you apply to, to reflect the specific language of that job description. This takes two minutes if you keep a master list of all your skills and pull the most relevant twelve for each application. It has a significant impact on ATS scoring and signals to recruiters that you read the job description carefully rather than sending a generic CV.

What to Cut

Generic soft skills, as discussed. Outdated tools that nobody uses in your field anymore. Skills you listed because they sound impressive but that you'd genuinely struggle to use in a working context, because recruiters do follow up on every item on a CV, and a skill you can't back up in conversation is more damaging than not listing it. If you once knew something but it's been years and you're rusty, either leave it off or add a note that you'd need a refresh.

Where to Put the Skills Section

For technical roles where skills are the primary filter (software engineering, data, design), the skills section often works best directly after your personal statement, before experience. For more senior roles where your track record is the main signal, placing it after experience makes more sense, because the question of what you've done matters more than the tools you've used to do it. There's no universal rule; follow the logic of what a recruiter in your specific field is looking for first.