How to List Skills on a CV
3 min read·Updated 28 Oct 2025
The skills section is the easiest part of a CV to write badly, because it is the only part where you can add material without having done anything. That is precisely why experienced readers discount it unless it is well constructed.
Done properly it is genuinely useful: it is where a reader confirms in two seconds that you have the thing the advert asked for.
Group them
An ungrouped list of thirty items is unreadable and signals exposure rather than competence. Grouping does two things: it makes the block scannable, and it demonstrates that you can tell the difference between categories of skill.
Four or five groups of five to eight items is about right. The group names should be meaningful in your field — "Languages & Frameworks" for a developer, "Audit & Assurance" for an auditor, "Clinical Procedures" for a clinician.
Be specific
Weak
Microsoft Office, communication, teamwork, problem solving, attention to detail
Stronger
Excel (Power Query, pivot models, SUMIFS), SQL (window functions, CTEs), Power BI (DAX, row-level security)
The first list is on millions of CVs and carries no information. The second tells a reader exactly what level you work at, and is specific enough to be tested — which is what makes it believable.
The ten-minute rule
Remove anything you would not want to be interviewed on for ten minutes. This is the single most useful edit you can make to a skills section.
It is uncomfortable, because everyone has a few items on the list that are really "used once in a tutorial". Those items are also the ones most likely to be picked up in an interview, precisely because they stand out from the rest.
What not to include
- Soft skills as a bare list. "Communication, teamwork, leadership" proves nothing. Demonstrate these inside your experience bullets instead.
- Skill bars, star ratings or percentages. They mean nothing precise — is 80% JavaScript better than 70%? — and applicant tracking systems read them as nothing at all.
- Basic computer literacy, unless the role is genuinely entry-level. Being able to use email has not been a skill for twenty years.
- Anything already obvious from your job title.
- Very long tool lists that duplicate what is in your experience section.
Where to put the section
In technical fields — software, data, engineering, anything with a specific stack — put a compact skills block above experience. It is the first thing a technical reader looks for.
In most other fields it belongs after experience, where it confirms rather than leads.
Either way, keep it to a block a reader can take in without scrolling. If it is longer than about eight lines, it is doing too much.
Languages
Language skills deserve their own section rather than being buried in the skills list, and they should use a scale rather than a vague word.
The CEFR scale — A1 to C2, plus native — is understood internationally and is far more informative than "fluent" or "conversational". C1 means something specific; "good working knowledge" does not.
Questions
Should I copy skills from the job advert?
How many skills should I list?
Do soft skills belong on a CV at all?
The same structure, applied to a field
Each of these works through a complete fictional CV for that profession, including the conventions where the general advice above does not hold.
- Python DeveloperA backend Python CV that separates web services, data pipelines and automation, because employers hire for one of the three.
- Machine Learning EngineerAn ML engineering CV weighted towards serving, latency, retraining and cost rather than model selection.
- QA / Automation EngineerA quality engineering CV built around escaped defects, suite reliability and release confidence rather than test counts.
- UI/UX DesignerA design CV that supports the portfolio rather than duplicating it: research method, decisions made, and what changed as a result.
Put this into practice
The editor keeps your CV as structured content, so the section order and wording decisions in this guide are easy to apply and easy to change again.