Skills to put on your resume (with skills finder)

What's the difference between hard and soft skills?

Hard skills are the things you can do and were trained to do, along with the software that goes with them. They're specific enough to be named, matched against a job ad and checked at interview.

Soft skills describe how you work with other people. Nothing scans for them, so they tend to land later, when a hiring manager is picturing you in their team.

Hard skills

Your hard skills are the ones the job is built on. An accountant's are things like financial reporting and tax compliance, then Xero and MYOB by name. A registered nurse's are patient assessment and medication management, then the ward's own charting system. An electrician's are wiring and building codes, then the multimeter.

The occupation data behind this page lists the tools each job runs on, and across 350 Australian occupations that comes to more than 1,300 different tools and systems. A typical job names about five. That's why "computer literate" reads as vague. Whatever your work runs on has a name, and the name is what gets matched.

If you're not sure which skills your own job calls for, type the job title below and they appear on this page: specialist skills, software and tools, and general skills, drawn from the site's own data on 350 Australian jobs. You won't need to run a second search or click through to a results page.

Soft skills

Soft skills are the easiest ones to list and the hardest ones to evidence. Communication, time management and staying calm when things go wrong turn up on most resumes, usually worded so generally that they tell a hiring manager very little.

They do matter, and the wording is what makes the difference. A ward on a night shift needs someone who stays steady when a patient goes downhill at 3am, and a sales floor needs someone who can take a knock-back and keep going. "Team player" describes neither.

It helps to say what the team actually needs, in the words that team would use:

• Communication becomes "explains technical detail to clients who don't have the background".
• Time management becomes "runs a caseload of thirty without missing a review date".
• Staying calm under pressure becomes "handles escalations on a night shift".

The lookup above also lists the general skills each job calls for, which can help if nothing springs to mind.

How do you turn a skill into a resume bullet?

Listing a skill makes a claim, and a single line further down the page is what supports it. Attaching the scale of the work, or what changed because of it, is usually enough.

• Financial reporting, for an accountant: don't just list it, write "Prepared monthly financial reports for a 40-person business, cutting close time from five days to two."
• Worksite safety management, for an electrician: "Ran toolbox talks and safety checks across a six-person crew, zero lost-time incidents in two years."
• Patient care and support, for a registered nurse: "Managed care for a 12-bed ward across night shifts, handling handover for up to 15 patients."
• Agile delivery, for a software engineer: "Ran sprint planning for a five-person team, cutting release cycle time from three weeks to one."

Keep the skill itself in your skills section and let the line in your work history carry the evidence. The same goes for a cover letter, where a skill named without an example reads as filler too.

What if you don't have much work experience yet?

Plenty of people filling in this box haven't had a full-time job yet. The approach doesn't change, only where the evidence comes from. A Saturday morning on the canteen roster shows that you turn up when you said you would, and a group assignment shows you can work with people who don't all pull their weight.

There's usually more of this to draw on than it first seems:

• Study: group projects, deadlines you met, presentations you had to give.
• Casual or unpaid work: a shift at the school canteen, or helping out in a family business.
• Sport and volunteering: a team you turn up for every week, or a junior side you help coach.
• Anything you run yourself: a side hustle, or the club account nobody else wanted to run.

Put your general skills first here, and say where each one came from. For a retail assistant job, handling money accurately and staying polite with someone who's annoyed are the work itself, and you can show both without ever having been paid. The guide to writing a resume with no work experience covers building the rest of the page around that same evidence.

Skills to leave off your resume

The section only has room for six to ten items, so a generic entry pushes out one that could have helped you. These are the ones worth cutting first.

• "Team player" and "hard worker" on their own: every applicant claims these, so they carry no signal at all.
• "Detail-oriented" without evidence: fine as a general skill, but only once it's backed up further down the page.
• "Computer literate" instead of naming the software: if the job runs on Xero, AutoCAD or Salesforce, say so.
• A skill from a different job entirely: something impressive but irrelevant reads as filler, to a recruiter and a scanner alike.

Getting past the applicant tracking system

Mirroring the job ad's own language is what gets a person and a scanner reading your resume the same way. If an ad lists "BAS preparation" twice and your resume says "tax paperwork", it's worth changing yours to match, because it's the same work and there's no reason to make anyone guess.

Where the ad's wording is true of you, use it, and where it isn't, leave it out. Padding the page with terms you can't back up won't get you through, and it comes apart at interview.

If you're building the rest of the resume around this section, start from the resume template. And if you could talk for a minute about every item you've listed, the section is doing its job.