Skills to put on a resume: 60 examples for 2026 (hard + soft)

Hard skills vs soft skills

Recruiters spend more time on your skills to put on a resume than you would expect — it is often the first section an applicant tracking system parses and the fastest way a human confirms you match the role. Get it right and you clear the keyword filter and pass the six-second scan. Get it wrong and a qualified candidate reads as generic.

The first distinction to nail is hard skills versus soft skills. Hard skills are specific, teachable, and testable — Python, financial modeling, SEO, Salesforce. You either have them or you do not, and they are easy to verify. Soft skills are how you work — communication, adaptability, stakeholder management. They are real, but they are almost impossible to prove in a list, which changes where and how you should use them.

The practical rule: list hard skills, demonstrate soft skills. A skills section should be dense with concrete, searchable hard skills. Soft skills belong in your experience bullets, where a result proves the trait — "aligned three teams on a shared roadmap" shows collaboration far better than the word "collaboration" ever will.

60 example skills, grouped by category

Use this as a bank to pull from, not a checklist to copy wholesale. Pick only the entries that are true for you and relevant to the target role.

Technical and tools

• Python, SQL, JavaScript, TypeScript, R
• Git, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure
• Excel (advanced), Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Figma

Data and analytics

• Data analysis, data visualization, A/B testing
• Tableau, Power BI, Looker, dbt
• Statistical modeling, forecasting, SQL reporting, ETL pipelines

Communication

• Technical writing, copywriting, editing
• Public speaking, presentation design, cross-functional communication
• Client-facing communication, documentation, stakeholder updates

Leadership and management

• People management, hiring, mentoring, coaching
• Performance reviews, team building, conflict resolution
• Strategic planning, budgeting, OKR setting

Project and operations

• Agile, Scrum, Kanban, sprint planning
• Roadmapping, backlog prioritization, risk management
• Process improvement, vendor management, resource planning

Marketing and growth

• SEO, SEM, content marketing, email marketing
• Google Analytics, conversion optimization, paid social
• Marketing automation, lifecycle marketing, campaign analysis

How to choose which skills to list

A skills section with 40 entries signals nothing. A section with 12 skills that clearly match the posting signals a targeted, qualified candidate. The single most effective move is to mirror the language of the job description — if it says "stakeholder management", write "stakeholder management", not "managing stakeholders".

Work from the posting, not from memory. Paste the job description into the Job Description Analyzer to surface the exact skills and keywords it weights, then keep the ones you can honestly defend. The full workflow — mapping each requirement to real evidence instead of stuffing keywords — is in our guide to tailoring a resume to the job description.

Two guardrails. First, match the phrasing but never claim a skill you cannot discuss for two minutes in an interview. Second, prioritize the skills named in the first third of the posting — those are almost always the must-haves, and the ones a recruiter searches on first. For AI-era roles specifically, our AI skills resume examples show which tools and capabilities now carry real weight.

Where to place the skills section

Placement depends on how much your skills sell you. For technical, analytical, and early-career roles, put a compact skills section near the top, right under your summary — it front-loads the keywords a screener and a parser both look for. For senior and leadership roles where experience does the selling, a skills section lower on page one is perfectly fine.

Format it for machines as much as for humans. Applicant tracking systems keyword-match your listed skills against the job description, so a clean comma-separated or simple bulleted list parses reliably, while skills buried inside graphics, columns, or rating bars often are not read at all. Group related skills under plain-text labels the parser can recognize.

Before you submit, confirm the match. Run your resume and the job description through the ATS Resume Checker — it shows which required skills are present, which are missing, and whether your formatting survives parsing. That one check catches the most common reason a qualified resume gets filtered out: the right skill described in the wrong words.

What to leave off

Some entries actively weaken a resume. Cut anything obvious, undefendable, or outdated:

• Baseline skills everyone claims: Microsoft Word, email, internet research, basic computer skills
• Vague soft-skill labels with no proof: "hard worker", "team player", "detail-oriented", "go-getter"
• Skills you cannot back in an interview — an inflated "expert" rating collapses the moment you are asked to demonstrate it
• Genuinely dated tools that age you without adding value, unless the role specifically asks for them
• Proficiencies the job already implies — a designer listing "creativity", a writer listing "typing"

The test for every line is simple: would a hiring manager for this role search for it, and can you defend it under questioning? If the answer to either is no, that space is better spent on a skill that is both true and relevant. A short, sharp, tailored list beats an exhaustive one every time.