Skills for a CV: What to Put On It, Where, and How to Prove Each One

Start with the job advert, not with a list of skills you think sound impressive. Copy out every skill, tool and quality it mentions, then mark the ones you can back up with something you did. Those marked items are your key skills for this CV. Everything else is either a gap to address honestly or noise to leave out.

Use the advert's own wording where it is accurate. If the role asks for stakeholder management and your CV says relationship building, a recruiter searching their database for the advert's phrase may never find you. Mirroring the language is not gaming anything; it is making sure the person and the software reading your CV recognise the match. Our guide to what an ATS actually reads from your CV explains why exact terms matter more than synonyms.

Then cut. A list of skills for a CV that runs to thirty items tells the reader you could not decide which mattered. Five to ten well-chosen skills, each one evidenced further down the page, will do more than a wall of keywords.

Hard skills are the teachable, checkable ones: a programming language, Excel modelling, a forklift licence, Xero, a second language, CSCS card, NEBOSH. They are easy to verify and easy for software to match, so they deserve a clear place in your CV skills section.

Soft skills for a CV are the behavioural ones: communication, teamwork, problem solving, leadership, adaptability, time management, attention to detail. They matter to employers, but they are the skills recruiters trust least when they appear as a bare list, because everyone writes them. A soft skill earns its place when a bullet proves it: 'Resolved a backlog of 140 complaints in six weeks by reorganising the team rota' says problem solving and teamwork without using either word. The same goes for leadership skills: a CV that says a team of six hit target three quarters running shows leadership better than the word does.

The practical rule: list hard skills by name, and let your achievements carry the soft skills. If you do name a soft skill in the skills section, make sure at least one bullet below shows it working.

Search for the best skills for a CV and you will find lists of the 7 soft skills, the top 6 skills or 10 basic skills, each with a different set of items. There is no official list behind any of those numbers. What does exist in the UK are a couple of published frameworks that schools, employers and training providers use, and they are useful as a vocabulary when you are trying to name what you are good at.

The Skills Builder Universal Framework, used by schools, employers and charities, sets out eight essential skills: listening, speaking, problem solving, creativity, adapting, planning, leadership and teamwork. The Department for Education's essential digital skills framework (first published in 2018) groups the digital skills adults need under five headings: communicating, handling information and content, transacting, problem solving, and being safe and legal online. Neither is a list to paste into your CV. Both are good prompts for spotting transferable skills you have been using without naming them.

Transferable skills are simply skills that carry from one job, or one part of life, to another: organising a rota carries from retail into an office, explaining a fault to a customer carries into training staff. They matter most to career changers, school leavers and people returning to work, because they are the bridge between what you have done and what the new job needs. The table shows what evidence for each of the eight essential skills tends to look like on a real CV.

Each line below is an example of skills for CV sections in that kind of role: a starting list, not a menu to copy whole. Pick the ones the advert asks for and your experience supports, then use the advert's own words for them.

Two cautions about any list like this. First, the same skill is worded differently in different sectors: 'stakeholder management' in an office is 'working with site managers and clients' on a building site, so use the version your target employer uses. Second, a list is where you start, not what you send: a customer service CV with all seven items from that line and no evidence below is weaker than one with four skills, each shown working in a bullet.

Hard skills are the part of the skills section that software and recruiters search for directly, so they are worth naming precisely: the exact software, the exact qualification, the exact licence. 'Accounting software' matches nothing; 'Xero' matches the search a recruiter actually runs. Below are hard skills grouped by the kind of thing they are, a starting point for the skills to list on a CV rather than a menu. Most CVs need something from three or four of these rows, not all of them.

Where a skill has a recognised level, give it. Language skills are often described using the Common European Framework of Reference levels (A1 at the beginning to C2 at the top), driving licences by category, and qualifications by their full name and level. 'Conversational Spanish' is vague; 'Spanish (B2)' is something an employer can test.

'Proficient in Microsoft Office' is on so many CVs that readers no longer register it. Computer skills for a CV land when they are specific about the tool and about what you did with it: 'Excel: built the weekly stock report with lookups and pivot tables' tells a hiring manager more than any level descriptor.

Match the depth to the job. For an office role, name the packages the advert mentions and one thing you do in each. For a technical role, group tools by type (languages, frameworks, cloud, databases) and keep the list to what you have used in real work in the last few years. In both cases, if a tool appears in your skills section, it should appear again somewhere in your experience, doing something.

Basic digital skills, such as email, video calls and online forms, are assumed for most jobs and take space without adding anything. The exception is a role, often entry-level or in a sector moving online, where the advert asks for them; then name them briefly, in the advert's words.

On a standard UK CV the skills section sits after your profile and before your experience, or directly after your experience if your recent roles are the stronger opening. Both work. What matters is that it is short: one block of five to ten skills, written as a plain list or a single line separated by bullets, readable in a couple of seconds.

Keep it as text. Skill bars, star ratings and percentages look tidy and mean nothing: 80% Excel is not a fact anyone can check, and software reading your CV sees either nothing or a stray number. A recruiter who reformats CVs for clients will convert those graphics into a plain list anyway, as our piece on what recruiters change on every CV describes.

If you use a two-column layout, keep the skills in the main column for online applications. Sidebars can be read out of order by some software, which is why the ATS-friendly CV template guide recommends a single column when the CV goes through a form.

Here is the method from the top of this guide applied to a real-looking advert. Imagine an operations coordinator role at a logistics firm asking for: strong Excel, experience with a warehouse management system, scheduling deliveries, dealing with suppliers and drivers, problem solving under time pressure, and a full UK driving licence.

Our fictional applicant, Dan, has spent four years as a shift supervisor at a supermarket depot. His old skills section read: 'Hard-working, team player, good communicator, Microsoft Office, leadership, attention to detail, punctual.' None of that is wrong, and none of it matches the advert.

Rewritten against the advert, it reads: 'Excel (rotas, delivery trackers, lookups) · Warehouse management system (daily use, goods in and dispatch) · Delivery scheduling · Supplier and haulier liaison · Shift supervision (team of 12) · Full UK driving licence.' His communication skills and leadership skills are no longer claimed in the list; they show up in the bullets. Every item is in the advert's language, every item is something he can talk about at interview, and every item reappears as a bullet in his experience: the tracker he built, the late-delivery problem he fixed, the team he ran.

Notice what went. 'Punctual' and 'hard-working' are expected of everyone. 'Attention to detail' is better shown by a bullet about stock accuracy. 'Team player' is shown by the supervision line. The new section is shorter and does far more work.

School leavers, students and people returning after a long gap often think they have no skills to list. They usually have plenty; they just come from school, volunteering, caring, sport, clubs and projects rather than from a payslip. The rule is the same as for everyone else: name the skill, then prove it somewhere on the page.

Good sources of evidence are a Duke of Edinburgh award, a part-time or Saturday job, helping run a club or team, a school or college project, volunteering, looking after a relative, or anything you organised. 'Organised a charity quiz night for 80 people, booking the venue and selling tickets' proves planning, communication and responsibility at once, and it is far more convincing than the three words on their own.

Keep the list short, put your education first, and use the graduate CV templates, which are laid out for CVs that lead with study and projects rather than a long work history.

A skills-based CV layout (also called a functional CV) organises your experience under skill headings rather than by job, with a short employment list at the end. It suits genuine career changers, people returning after a long gap and people whose transferable skills matter more than their job titles.

It backfires with most recruiters, who read a skills-based CV as an attempt to hide something, and with parsing software, which needs a job title next to an employer next to dates to understand your history. If you use one, keep a dated employment list on page one and make the skill sections specific. Our comparison of the five CV formats and who each suits sets out when a hybrid format is the better choice.

These come up constantly on CVs that pass across a recruiter's desk, and each one costs the space it takes.

The skills list gets you matched; the experience section gets you believed. For each key skill, find one bullet where it produced a result, and put the result first: what changed, by how much, for whom. 'Built a weekly Excel model that cut stock write-offs by a fifth' proves Excel modelling better than any rating could.

If you use AI to rewrite those bullets, check that it has not added a figure or a tool you never mentioned; models like to strengthen a sentence by inventing a number. Our guide to using AI on your CV without getting caught covers the checks.

ConnectIQ reads your existing CV, shows you the skills it extracted beside where each came from on the page, and sets the same content in a clean layout from our CV templates. Your first conversion is free with no card, and the AI only changes wording if you ask it to.