List of Skills for Resume: 200+ Examples by Job
A generic list of skills is the reason most skills sections match nothing. This one is sorted by the job you are applying for, so you can copy the words that actually appear in postings for it.
Written by Siyuan Zheng
The skills to put on a resume are the specific tools, methods, certifications and work habits that the job posting asks for — and that you can prove with a line in your work history. Below is a list of skills for resume writing, grouped by occupation, with 10–14 hard skills for each job family and a separate list of transferable skills that hold up in any role. Pick the group closest to the job you want, keep only what you have actually done, and use the posting's exact wording.
This page is the lookup list. If your question is how many skills to list or where the section goes, we ran that test separately: in our skills section experiment, a resume with eight generic soft skills matched 22% of a posting's keywords, while a ten-item list copied from the posting matched 89%. The words matter more than the count, which is why the lists below are sorted by job rather than by "top 10 skills employers want."
Hard skills vs. soft skills vs. transferable skills
| Type | What it is | Examples | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hard skills | Teachable, testable, usually tied to a tool or certification | SQL, phlebotomy, QuickBooks, forklift operation | Skills section, and repeated in bullets |
| Soft skills | How you work with people and pressure | De-escalation, active listening, prioritization | Inside bullets, as something you did |
| Transferable skills | Hard or soft skills that carry across industries | Scheduling, budgeting, training new hires, documentation | Both — the main case for career changers |
The US Department of Labor's O*NET database, which profiles roughly a thousand occupations, sorts general skills into 35 categories: 10 basic skills such as reading comprehension, writing, speaking, active listening and critical thinking, and 25 cross-functional ones such as time management, coordination, troubleshooting and quality control analysis. They are a reasonable vocabulary for soft and transferable skills — but on a resume they work as evidence inside a bullet, not as one-word list entries.
Healthcare resume skills
Healthcare postings are unusually literal: they name certifications and procedures, and screeners check for them. List licences and certifications with the issuing body (BLS from the American Heart Association, CPhT from PTCB) rather than in shorthand alone.
- Clinical: vital signs, patient intake, phlebotomy, EKG/ECG, specimen collection, wound care, medication administration, IV insertion, sterile technique, infection control
- Systems: Epic, Cerner (Oracle Health), eClinicalWorks, Dentrix, Pyxis, electronic health records (EHR)
- Admin and compliance: HIPAA, ICD-10 coding, CPT coding, insurance verification, prior authorization, appointment scheduling
- Certifications to name in full: BLS, ACLS, PALS, CMA (AAMA), RMA, CPhT, CNA, RDH
See how these sit in a full page in our registered nurse, medical assistant, pharmacy technician and dental assistant examples. For the line that goes above them, the healthcare resume objective guide has 16 examples by role.
Customer service and retail skills
- Point of sale: POS systems (Square, Toast, Clover, NCR), cash handling, cash drawer reconciliation, returns and exchanges, gift card and layaway processing
- Customer-facing: de-escalation, complaint resolution, upselling and cross-selling, product knowledge, loyalty program enrollment, bilingual service (name the language)
- Contact center: Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, Freshdesk, ticket triage, live chat support, call handling with average handle time (AHT) targets, first contact resolution
- Store operations: visual merchandising, planogram compliance, inventory counts, shrink and loss prevention, opening and closing procedures
Retail and service resumes get the most generic skills sections of any field — "friendly" and "hard-working" show up constantly. The posting almost always names something more concrete, such as cash handling or a specific POS. Examples: customer service representative, cashier, retail sales associate, server.
Skills: Customer service, Communication, Friendly, Hard-working, Team player, Problem solving, Microsoft Office
Skills: Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud, ticket triage, live chat support, de-escalation, refunds and chargebacks, order tracking, Spanish (fluent), typing 65 WPM
Every item in the second version is something an interviewer can verify or a posting can name. Each one also gives you a bullet to write: how many tickets a day, which escalations you handled, what you cut the backlog to.
Warehouse, logistics and trades skills
- Warehouse: order picking and packing, RF scanners, warehouse management systems (WMS), cycle counts, shipping and receiving, pallet jack, loading dock operations
- Equipment and safety: forklift certification (OSHA-compliant), reach truck, OSHA 10 / OSHA 30, lockout/tagout, hazmat handling, PPE compliance
- Trades: blueprint reading, preventive maintenance, electrical troubleshooting, HVAC, welding (MIG, TIG), hand and power tools, building codes
- Driving: CDL Class A or B, DOT compliance, route planning, electronic logging devices (ELD), clean driving record
In these roles a certification often matters more than any adjective — write its full name and, where it applies, an expiry date. Example: warehouse associate.
Administrative and office skills
- Scheduling: calendar management (Outlook, Google Calendar), travel booking, meeting coordination across time zones, Calendly
- Documents: Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Google Workspace, document formatting, minute taking, records management, DocuSign
- Front desk: multi-line phone systems, visitor management, mail and courier handling, office supply ordering
- Legal admin: legal research (Westlaw, LexisNexis), e-filing, case management software (Clio), document review, citation formatting
- Speed metrics, if asked: typing speed in WPM, 10-key in KPH
Examples: executive assistant, receptionist, paralegal.
Finance and accounting skills
- Accounting: accounts payable, accounts receivable, bank reconciliation, month-end close, general ledger, journal entries, accruals, payroll processing, GAAP
- Software: QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, Sage Intacct, Bill.com, Expensify
- Analysis: financial modeling, forecasting, variance analysis, budgeting, Excel (pivot tables, XLOOKUP, Power Query), Power BI
- Credentials: CPA, CMA, Enrolled Agent, QuickBooks ProAdvisor
Our accounting and finance resume guide covers how to word these for each level. Examples: bookkeeper, financial analyst.
Software, data and IT skills
- Languages: Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Go, C#, SQL
- Frameworks and platforms: React, Node.js, Django, Spring Boot, .NET, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure
- Engineering practice: Git, CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, unit testing, REST APIs, code review
- Data: SQL, dbt, Airflow, Spark, Snowflake, BigQuery, Tableau, Looker
- IT and security: Active Directory, Microsoft 365 administration, SIEM (Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel), vulnerability scanning, incident response, NIST CSF, CompTIA Security+
Group technical skills by type (languages, cloud, tools) instead of one comma-separated block — reviewers scan for one category at a time. More in our data engineer resume guide and the software engineer and cybersecurity analyst examples.
Business, project and operations skills
- Project management: Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Jira, Asana, risk registers, stakeholder management, PMP, CAPM
- Business analysis: requirements gathering, process mapping, user stories, user acceptance testing (UAT), SQL, Visio
- Operations: vendor management, SOP writing, KPI reporting, Lean, Six Sigma (Green Belt), capacity planning, P&L ownership
Examples: project manager, business analyst, operations manager.
Marketing and sales skills
- Digital marketing: SEO, Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, email marketing (Mailchimp, Klaviyo), A/B testing, marketing automation (HubSpot)
- Content and social: copywriting, content calendars, Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud, short-form video editing, community management, social listening
- Sales: CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot), prospecting, cold calling, pipeline management, contract negotiation, quota attainment
- Real estate: MLS, CMA (comparative market analysis), lead generation, showing coordination, state licence (name the state)
Examples: social media manager, real estate agent.
Teaching and education skills
- Instruction: lesson planning, differentiated instruction, classroom management, formative assessment, curriculum mapping
- Support: IEP and 504 plan implementation, ESL/ELL support, parent-teacher communication, behavior intervention plans
- Tools: Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, Seesaw, PowerSchool, SMART Board
- Credentials: state teaching certificate (name the subject and grade band), CPR/First Aid
Example: teacher.
Computer skills for a resume, by level
"Computer skills" on its own tells a reader nothing. Name the program, and if the posting asks for depth, the feature that proves it.
| Level | What to write | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | The program names the posting uses | Microsoft Word, Outlook, Google Docs, Zoom |
| Intermediate | The program plus the features you use weekly | Excel (pivot tables, XLOOKUP, conditional formatting) |
| Advanced | The feature plus what you built with it | Excel (Power Query, VBA macros) — automated a weekly 3-hour report |
The third column's last part belongs in a bullet, not the skills list. The list holds the tool; the bullet holds the proof.
Transferable skills that work for any job
These are the examples of skills to put on a resume when you are changing fields or have little paid experience. Each one is only worth listing if you can name the situation behind it — so here is each skill with the kind of evidence that makes it believable.
| Skill | Evidence a reader trusts |
|---|---|
| Training and onboarding | How many people you trained, and on what |
| Scheduling | How many people or shifts, over what period |
| Budgeting | The size of the budget you owned |
| Documentation | What you wrote and who used it |
| Process improvement | The before and after (time, errors, cost) |
| Data entry and accuracy | Volume per day and error rate, if tracked |
| Conflict resolution | The type of escalation you handled |
| Vendor or supplier management | Number of vendors, or the contract you renegotiated |
| Public speaking and presenting | The audience and how often |
| Bilingual communication | The language and the setting you used it in |
| Inventory control | What you counted, and how often |
| Quality control | What you checked against, and what you caught |
If you have no paid work history yet, these are the skills you can usually demonstrate from coursework, volunteering or part-time jobs. Our guide to a resume with no work experience shows how to turn them into entries.
Skills to leave off your resume
- Adjectives pretending to be skills: hard-working, motivated, detail-oriented, passionate. Show them in a bullet or drop them.
- Skills the posting does not ask for and you would not want to be asked about. Every item is an interview question.
- Outdated defaults: "Microsoft Office" as a single item for an office role (name the apps), "Internet" or "email".
- Self-rated bars, stars and percentages. A parser reads a five-star graphic as nothing, and a human discounts a rating you gave yourself.
- Tools you used once in a class years ago, unless the posting names them and you would happily relearn them this week.
Pasted a posting and not sure which of its skills your resume is missing?
Compare your resume to the jobHow to pick from this list in five minutes
- Open the posting and highlight every tool, certification and method it names.
- Find the matching group above and tick what you have actually done.
- Keep the overlap between the two. Use the posting's spelling where they differ.
- Add two or three transferable skills only if the posting mentions them.
- For your top three, check that a bullet in your experience shows you using them. If not, write that bullet — strong verbs help, see our resume action verbs guide.
FAQ
What are good skills to put on a resume?
The ones that appear in the job posting and that you can back up with an example. For most jobs that means specific tools, certifications and procedures first, with soft skills shown inside your experience bullets rather than listed on their own.
How many skills should I list?
Usually 8 to 14, but the number is a side effect of filtering, not a target. In our test, ten skills taken from the posting scored the same as a padded list of 22. The full experiment is in our skills section test.
Should I put soft skills on my resume?
Put them in when the posting names them, and prove them in a bullet: "resolved 40+ billing escalations a week" says more about de-escalation than the word does. A list of soft skills with no evidence matches little and persuades no one.
What computer skills should I put on a resume?
The specific programs the posting mentions — Excel, Salesforce, Epic, QuickBooks — at the level you can actually use them. Write the features for anything you claim at intermediate or above, and leave out basics like email and web browsing.
Can I use the same skills list for every application?
You can keep one master list, but trim and reorder it for each posting. Two postings for the same title often name different tools, and the skills section is the cheapest part of the resume to adjust.
This guide is general advice, not a guarantee. Hiring outcomes depend on many things outside any resume — but a clear, correctly-parsed, well-targeted resume is the part you control.