Skills to Put on a CV
The skills on your CV should be a short, relevant mix of practical, job-specific skills and personal strengths that suit the role, backed up by real examples elsewhere on your CV. Choose skills from the job advert first, then add others that genuinely apply to you.
Hard skills and soft skills
Hard skills are practical and specific, such as using a till system, driving a forklift, or basic bookkeeping. Soft skills are more general strengths, such as communication, reliability or teamwork.
A strong CV usually includes both, weighted towards whatever the job advert asks for most. A role that is largely practical, such as a trade job, will lean more heavily on hard skills, while a customer-facing role will draw more on soft skills.
Neither type of skill is automatically more important than the other; what matters is whether it genuinely reflects the role and can be backed up with a real example elsewhere on your CV.
Start with the job advert
Read the advert and person specification carefully and note the skills it mentions directly. These are the skills most likely to be searched for or looked at first, so make sure they appear on your CV if they genuinely apply to you.
If a skill appears more than once in an advert, or is listed as essential rather than desirable, it is usually worth prioritising near the top of your skills section.
This approach also naturally tailors your CV to each role, since the skills you highlight will shift slightly depending on what each specific employer has asked for.
Back skills up with evidence
A skill listed on its own is easy to write and easy to ignore. Where you can, connect a skill to a bullet point in your work experience that shows it in action, rather than only listing it once in a skills section.
For example, rather than simply listing 'problem solving', a bullet such as 'Identified a recurring stock error and worked with the team to correct it' demonstrates the same skill with real weight behind it.
This pairing between a skill and a real example is one of the most effective ways to strengthen a CV, since it shows rather than simply tells a reader what you are capable of.
Examples by sector
Different roles call for different mixes of skills. Use these as a starting point, adjusting to your own experience and to the specific advert you are applying to.
These lists are a starting point rather than a fixed template; the strongest skills section is always one built around your own genuine experience rather than copied directly from an example.
- Retail: customer service, cash handling, stock management, visual merchandising, teamwork
- Care: patience, communication, record keeping, moving and handling, reliability
- Office and admin: attention to detail, Microsoft Office, diary management, data entry, organisation
- Trade and warehouse: manual handling, health and safety awareness, forklift licence (where held), time management
Skills to avoid listing
Avoid vague entries like 'hard worker' or 'good with people' on their own, without any supporting detail. Also avoid listing software or systems you have only used briefly, since this can come up in an interview and is best avoided unless you can speak to it confidently.
It is also worth avoiding an overly long list. Around six to ten well-chosen skills are more useful to a reader than twenty vaguely related ones.
Avoid listing skills purely because they sound impressive if they have little to do with the role you are applying for; an unrelated skill can distract from the more relevant ones sitting alongside it.
Where to place your skills section
For most CVs, a skills section works well either just below the personal statement or after your work experience and education. Placing it higher up can make sense if the job advert is very skills-focused, since it puts the most relevant information near the top of the page.
Whichever position you choose, keep the formatting simple, such as a short list or a couple of grouped lines, so the section is easy to scan quickly rather than reading like a dense paragraph.
Reviewing your skills section over time
Skills sections can go stale if they are not updated between applications. A skill that was relevant for one job might not matter for the next, so it is worth revisiting this section each time you apply rather than reusing exactly the same list.
As you gain more experience, it is also worth removing basic or outdated skills that no longer reflect your current level, replacing them with more advanced or more relevant ones.
A skills section built this way, reviewed and adjusted regularly, tends to stay far more useful over time than one written once and left unchanged across many different applications.
