Should you have a skills section on a resume, and what goes in it? Keep one. It's the fastest place for a recruiter to check that you use the tools a posting asks for, and it gives an applicant tracking system (ATS) the exact terms it searches on. But a skills section only helps when it's short, grouped, matched to the job and backed up by your experience. A long list of everything you've ever touched does the opposite: it makes you look padded and invites interview questions you can't answer.
This guide covers what to include, what to leave off, how to handle skills you only used in courses or side projects, and how to set it up in Curri so each tailored resume gets the right list.
Do you need a skills section on a resume?
The advice online splits into two camps. One says hiring managers skip skills lists and read your job history, so you should fold skills into your bullets. The other says recruiters, who are often not specialists, scan for keyword matches first, so a skills section near the top is what gets you through to the hiring manager.
Both are right about their own reader, which is why the answer is "both":
- The skills section is for the scan. A recruiter or ATS search checks whether the terms are there at all.
- Your experience is for the proof. A hiring manager checks whether you actually used them, where, and to what result.
A skill that appears in your skills section and in a bullet under a real job counts twice. A skill that appears only in the list is a claim with nothing behind it. A skill that appears only in a bullet can be missed by a quick scan. So keep the section, and make sure every important item in it also shows up somewhere in your work, projects or certifications.
What to put in a resume skills section
Hard skills the job asks for
Tools, languages, software, methods and spoken languages, when the role calls for them. Use the posting's spelling ("PostgreSQL", not "Postgres DB"; "Salesforce", not "CRM tools") because that's the string a recruiter will type into a search.
Only skills you can talk about
A simple test: if an interviewer said "tell me about the last time you used this", could you answer with a real example? If not, leave it off. Experienced reviewers say the same thing in different words: a list of 30 tools from someone with a year and a half of experience reads as padding, and every item is fair game in the interview.
8 to 15 items, grouped
Fewer than about eight looks thin for most roles; more than about fifteen stops being scannable. Group them under plain labels that fit your field, for example:
- Frontend: React, TypeScript, CSS, accessibility
- Data: SQL, dbt, Looker
- Clinical: patient assessment, EHR documentation, medication administration
- Tools: Git, Jira, Figma
Groups let a reader find what they're looking for in a second, and they make a long-ish list feel organized instead of dumped.
An optional one-line summary
A single line above the groups can say what ties them together ("Component libraries, CSS architecture and accessible UI"). It's optional. If it just repeats your resume summary, drop it.
What to leave off
- Generic soft skills on their own. "Team player", "hard-working" and "strong communicator" tell a reader nothing in a list. Show them in a bullet instead ("Trained 6 new hires on the opening checklist"). The exception is a specific, checkable skill a posting names, like "conflict de-escalation" for a support role.
- Rating bars, stars and percentages. "JavaScript 80%" means nothing to a reader, and a graphic bar carries no text an ATS can read. If level matters, say it in words in a bullet.
- Self-rated levels like "Expert". Many interviewers will test the word. If you write "Expert", expect expert questions.
- Filler and obvious tools. "Microsoft Word", "email" and "internet research" take space you could give to something the job asks for, unless the posting lists them.
- "etc." and vague umbrellas. "Cloud (AWS, Azure, etc.)" invites the question "which ones, and what did you do?". Name only what you've used.
- Duplicates. Listing "OWASP" and then each OWASP item separately, or "JavaScript" and "JS", wastes lines.
Skills from courses, certificates and side projects
This is the question career changers and early-career people ask most: you've learned real tools, but not at a job. You can list them. The trick is honesty about context, so a reader isn't surprised in the interview.
- Put the evidence next to the skill. Give each project or certificate two or three bullets saying what you built or did with the tool. "Configured VLANs and ACLs on a home lab with three switches" beats a bare "Networking" in the list.
- Add a Technologies line to projects. Ending a project entry with "Technologies: React, Next.js, Framer Motion" ties those skills to proof without inflating your job history.
- Keep work and practice apart if the gap is large. If most of your list comes from courses, either keep the main skills section to what you've used for real and list the rest under each project, or label them clearly. Don't let a course tool sit next to your production tools as if they were the same.
- Don't skip your old field's skills. A nurse moving into IT has documentation, triage and calm-under-pressure examples that support help desk roles. Use the target field's words for them. For the full approach, see how to write a resume for a career change.
Where to put the skills section
- Near the top (under your summary) if the job is tool-heavy and your tools are a strong match, or if you're a career changer whose experience section doesn't yet say "IT" or "data" at a glance.
- Near the bottom if you're experienced and your job history already shows the stack; there the section is a quick reference.
Either way, use a plain heading: "Skills" or "Technical Skills". Creative headings and sidebars can confuse parsers. If you use a two-column template, read whether two-column resumes are ATS-friendly first.
Change the list for each job
You don't need a new resume from scratch for every application, but your skills section is the cheapest part to tailor. For each posting:
- Underline every tool, method or qualification in the requirements.
- Mark the ones you've actually used, and where.
- Move those to the front of their group, using the posting's spelling.
- Cut items the posting doesn't care about until you're back under about 15.
- Check that the top items also appear in a bullet or project.
Never add a skill you don't have because the posting lists it. If a must-have is missing, that's a gap to be honest about, not a word to slip into a list. If you apply to a few kinds of roles, keep one base version per role family, as described in how many resume versions you need.
How to build your skills section in Curri
Curri keeps a master Profile with everything you know, and writes each CV from it. That split fits the skills section well: the Profile holds the long list, and each CV gets a short, matched one.
1. Keep every skill in your Profile
Open Profile and go to Skills. Each skill has a name, an optional category and an optional proficiency (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced or Expert). Skills show grouped by category, and once you have ten or more you can search them and filter by level or category. Add skills takes a comma-separated or line-by-line list, so you can paste the skills line from an old resume in one go. You can also import a resume from a PDF to fill the Profile.
There's a separate Skills Summary section for the one-line overview.
The Profile can be longer than any CV, so put everything here, including tools from projects and courses. Where the evidence lives matters too: add the projects, certifications and job bullets that show each skill, because that's what the tailoring and scoring read.
2. See which requirements you can back up
When you score a job (from Jobs, or by pasting a posting under New CV), Curri checks each requirement against your Profile. A requirement only counts as met when your Profile shows you've actually worked with it. It isn't credited just because the skill is common for that kind of role. Met requirements show the line of your Profile that proves them.
The Profile also has a Gaps panel, "Missing in your saved job scores", listing requirements your saved jobs mark as missing, must-haves first, with the jobs that ask for them. Ask Curri next to a gap opens the chat with a request to help you cover it in your Profile. Use it to find real experience you forgot to add, not to add skills you don't have.
3. Tailor a CV and check its Skills section
Choose Tailor CV on a job. Curri's AI assistant writes the CV from your Profile, and its instructions for the skills section match the advice above: 8 to 15 skills, grouped logically, no rating bars, and no skill claimed that your Profile doesn't support. Here is the CV from the demo account, tailored to a UI engineer posting, with the job's requirements checklist on the left:
Notice the shape: a one-line summary, three short groups that put the posting's terms first, and a project with its own Technologies line backing those skills up. The unmet items in the checklist (years of experience, a versioned component library) were left as gaps rather than written into the list.
From there you can ask the assistant in the chat panel to change it, for example "move accessibility to the front of the UI engineering group". See how Curri approaches ATS optimization for more on matching a resume to a posting, or browse openings on the jobs board to try it on a real one.
Quick checklist
- One section, plain heading, 8 to 15 items in a few labeled groups
- The posting's spelling for every tool it names
- Every top item also shown in a job bullet, project or certification
- No rating bars, no "Expert" you can't defend, no "etc."
- Soft skills shown in bullets, not listed
- Course and project skills tied to the project that proves them
- Re-ordered and trimmed for each job you apply to