Skills to put on your CV: what employers look for and how to prove it

Start with the advert, not a list of skills from the internet. Every job advert tells you what it wants, usually twice: once in the duties ('you'll reconcile the bank accounts weekly') and once in the person specification ('experience with Xero essential'). Those two lists are your shopping list.

The National Careers Service guide to writing a CV gives the same advice in plain terms: look at the job description and highlight the skills the employer is asking for. It matters because employers don't really hire "fast learners". They hire people who can already do the specific Tuesday-morning tasks of the role. Find those tasks and your skills section almost writes itself.

Paste the advert into a document and highlight three things, then sort what you find into essentials and nice-to-haves, and lead with the essentials you genuinely have:

Hard skills are the specific, checkable ones: a piece of software, a technique, a process. They carry most of the weight in a skills section, because an interviewer can ask about them and screening software can match them word for word.

Be specific about your level. 'Excel' on its own could mean anything from typing a list to building a forecast. 'Excel: pivot tables, XLOOKUP, conditional formatting' tells the reader exactly what you can do, and gives an interviewer something real to ask you about.

Some examples by field, to help you spot the ones you already have:

Soft skills are how you work: communication, organisation, teamwork, problem solving, time management, customer service, leadership. Employers genuinely want them. The trouble is that everyone claims them, so the words on their own carry almost no weight.

If every CV promising excellent communication skills were telling the truth, nobody would ever have received a reply-all about the office fridge.

So here's the rule we'd apply: only list a soft skill if you can point to the moment you used it. Keep the skills section for the two or three soft skills the advert asks for by name, and put the evidence in your work history, where it does the convincing:

How you word a skill matters as much as which skill you pick. The pattern that works is simple: the skill, then the specifics, then where you used it.

Keep each line in the skills section short. The longer, result-led version belongs in your work history, where the same National Careers Service guide suggests two to three lines per achievement using the STAR method (situation, task, action, result).

And skip the star ratings and percentage bars. They look tidy, but nobody knows what 80% of Excel means, and screening software may not read graphics at all. Here's the difference good phrasing makes:

On a UK CV the skills section usually sits near the top, just under your introduction (the few lines under your name that sum up who you are and what you're after). That way a recruiter skimming the first half of page one sees the match straight away.

How many skills should you put on a CV? Six to ten is plenty for most roles. Fewer looks thin; many more and the important ones get lost. If you have more relevant skills than that, group them (software, finance, communication) rather than listing every one.

While you're there, leave off your age, date of birth, marital status and nationality, which the National Careers Service also advises against, and aim for around two pages in total. Then choose one of two common layouts:

Many employers, especially larger ones and recruitment agencies, collect applications through an applicant tracking system (ATS). It stores your CV, pulls out details like job titles and skills, and lets the recruiter search and filter the people who applied. Some systems also rank applications against the advert.

You'll read alarming claims online about software rejecting most CVs before a person ever sees them. Treat any specific figure with suspicion, because the practical advice is the same whatever the real number is:

Listing a skill is a claim. The strongest CVs back each important claim with something a recruiter can actually look at. The pattern we see is that a verifiable certificate starts the conversation, because it holds up when someone checks it, and the work behind it does the rest. Once an interviewer is asking about the dashboard you built rather than whether you studied the tool, you're in a much easier interview.

Be clear about what a certificate is, though. An OBA certificate shows you completed a practical course, and an employer can check it online. It isn't an accredited professional qualification such as AAT, or a vendor certification from Microsoft or Google, and if an advert asks for one of those by name, that's what you'll need. We've written more about which certifications are actually worth it, with a four-part test you can apply to anyone's, ours included.

Three kinds of proof work especially well:

Skills shortages are real. In the government's Employer Skills Survey 2024, just over a quarter of all vacancies (27%) were hard to fill because applicants lacked the skills, qualifications or experience the employer needed. That's a gap you can step into, if you pick the right skill.

There's no skill that guarantees a high income, whatever the 'high income skills' videos say. But some practical skills sit at the heart of better-paid roles and turn up across a huge range of adverts:

Here's the honest bit. You probably already have more skills than your CV shows. Most people undersell the things they do so routinely they've stopped noticing: the spreadsheet updated every week, the rota built every month, the angry customer calmed down every afternoon.

So before you pay anyone for anything, spend an hour on an audit. List every task from your last two roles, plus anything outside work (volunteering, running a club, a side business), and write the skill each one proves. Then hold that list against three real adverts. The free skills assessment on the National Careers Service site takes 5 to 10 minutes and makes a useful second opinion. Very often you'll find the gap is evidence and phrasing, not knowledge, and that fix costs nothing.

If the audit shows a genuine gap, a tool the adverts keep naming that you can't honestly claim, that's when a course earns its place. Every OBA course is a one-off purchase with lifetime access, a practical project you can put on your CV, a certificate employers can verify online, and the Career Centre tools for your CV and interviews. Not sure which one fits your gap? The free info pack sets out exactly what each course covers, so you can hold it up against the adverts on your screen before you decide.