Skills to Put on a Resume: 200+ Examples by Job (2026)

The skills to put on a resume are the eight to fifteen that the job posting asks for and that you can prove somewhere else on the page. That second half is where most resumes fail: in 44,255 resumes we checked, 63.4% listed skills in a Skills section that never appeared in a single experience, project or summary line, and the keyword category scored an average of just 24 out of 100. A skills list an ATS can match and a recruiter can believe has three properties: it uses the posting's exact terms, it groups hard skills by type, and every item is backed by a bullet. This guide gives you 200+ skills for a resume by job, the format that parses, and the evidence rule that turns a list into a shortlist.

Full breakdown in the ATS resume statistics report. The practical consequence: the Skills section is not where you win; it is where you get matched. The proof lives in the bullets.

How many skills to put on a resume, and which kind

Employers say the same thing from the other side of the desk. In NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update, the skills recruiters look for on entry-level resumes are led by teamwork, problem-solving and communication, and more than half of the employers surveyed named ten or more skills they want to see. The report is blunt about how they want to see them: listing the skill is not enough, they are looking for the example. That is the same gap our own data shows from the file side, where 63.4% of resumes list a skill that appears nowhere else on the page.

The skills section format that parses and reads

Group labels are not keywords; they are for the human reader. Keep them short and standard: Languages, Tools, Platforms, Methods, Certifications. Put the strongest group first. If a skill is on the list, it must be in a bullet: "Built a Power BI dashboard used weekly by 3 regional heads" is the evidence for "Power BI"; without it, the checker (and a good recruiter) treats the skill as unproven.

Two shortcuts, both free to try: the keyword optimizer reads a posting and lists the skills it asks for that your resume does not mention, and the job match score tells you how close the whole document is before you spend an evening rewriting it.

Skills for a resume by job (200+ examples)

Each row lists the hard skills recruiters and parsers look for in that role in 2026 and the two or three soft skills worth evidencing in bullets. Use the posting to pick; do not paste a whole row.

Three finished resumes where every skill in the section is proved by a bullet above it. Open one in the builder to see how the two halves line up.

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Data Analyst

Student data analyst resume that anchors a real Goldman Sachs internship, Snowflake and Tableau specifics, and 2 stack-relevant certs, the 3 signals 2026 finance and tech campus recruiters use as a phone-screen filter.

Why this resume works:

• •Built 8 Tableau dashboards as a Goldman Sachs Data Analytics intern, surfacing $480K in cross-desk margin leakage
• •Wrote 40+ SQL queries against a Snowflake warehouse and shipped a weekly retention report saving 4 hours per analyst
• •B.S. in Statistics from UCLA, 3.8 GPA, Google Data Analytics Certificate and Microsoft PL-300 (Power BI)

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Registered Nurse

This resume works because every bullet is anchored in measurable outcomes: 1:5 patient ratios, 99.4% medication accuracy, a 22% readmission reduction, and a 96th-percentile satisfaction score. These specifics transform a standard RN resume into a compelling evidence portfolio that stands out against generic applications.

Why this resume works:

• •99.4% medication accuracy managing a 1:5 patient ratio at NYU Langone Health
• •22% reduction in 30-day readmissions through structured discharge education and post-discharge follow-up protocols
• •96th-percentile Press Ganey patient satisfaction score for two consecutive quarters

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Digital Marketing Manager

Frames the manager as a P&L owner with a real seat at planning, measurement and creative reviews, not just a campaign executor.

Why this resume works:

• •Owns blended ROAS, MER and CAC across a multi-channel 2026 mix
• •Manages $6M+ paid budget with agency partners (Tinuiti, Wpromote)
• •Runs quarterly planning, MMM cadence and creative reviews

Soft skills on a resume: where they go and how to prove them

If you are unsure which soft skills a particular occupation is actually expected to have, do not guess from a listicle: the Occupational Outlook Handbook publishes an "Important Qualities" list for every occupation it covers, written by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics rather than by a resume site. It is a good source for the wording, and a good filter for what to leave out.

Soft skills belong in bullets, described as behaviour with a result, not as words in the Skills section. An ATS does not match "communication"; a recruiter does not believe it. The translation table below is how to write them.

Resume keywords: how to pull them from the job description

1. Copy the posting into a document. Highlight every tool, method, certification and noun phrase that appears in Requirements or Responsibilities. Those are the ATS keywords; the adjectives are not.
2. Note the exact form. If the posting says "Microsoft Excel", write "Microsoft Excel" at least once, not only "Excel". Include both an acronym and its long form once when both are common ("SEO (search engine optimisation)").
3. Rank by repetition and position. A term that appears in the title, the first paragraph and the requirements is the one to match in your summary, skills and at least one bullet.
4. Match honestly. Add a keyword only if you have used it; interviews check. Adjacent experience goes in a bullet as adjacent ("similar to Tableau" is fine, "Tableau" is not).
5. Do not stuff. 17.8% of resumes in our data repeat a term beyond natural use, and white-text keywords are reported as a problem, not a tactic.

The resume keyword optimizer does steps one to three from a pasted posting, and the job match score shows which of the posting's terms your resume already contains and which are missing.

Transferable skills for career changers and freshers

A transferable skill is a hard skill from one context that the new role also names. Excel modelling from a finance internship transfers to operations analytics; classroom assessment design transfers to instructional design; retail inventory counts transfer to warehouse operations. Write them in the target role's vocabulary and evidence them with the original number. What does not transfer is a soft skill with no story attached: "adaptable" from a career changer reads as a plea, "took over a second territory mid-quarter and hit 104%" reads as proof.

Skills section mistakes that cost points