Last updated: January 14th, 2025
You’ve got some serious skills. But the challenge is deciding which to put on your resume, and how to showcase them correctly. Googling a list? Don’t bother — you’ll get generic results.
Putting irrelevant or boilerplate skills on your resume is the best way to annoy recruiters and get rejected by Applicant Tracking Software.
But fear not.
My team has written over 3,000 resumes for Australian professionals with a consistent 4.9-star rating, so I know how to write a great resume.
Let me show you my secret method of showcasing skills that will help you get ahead of 99% of candidates.
| Key Takeaways: |
|---|
| Don’t cram your resume with generic soft skills like “attention to detail” and “problem solving”. Demonstrate them indirectly through your achievements instead. |
| Impress the ATS by adding relevant keywords to the “Key Skills” section. But avoid overstuffing. |
| Discover which skills your company values. Add them to your resume. |
| Grow your career by consistently developing new hard and soft skills. Set a goal for each year. Which skills will you add to your toolkit in 2025? |
How To Format Your Skills Section Correctly.
The Skills section belongs on the first page of your resume, at the very bottom.
Above: Showcase your skills at the bottom of page 1.
As you see in my example above, I suggest splitting a traditional Key Skills section into two:
- Key Assets. Focused on the human reader, this section demonstrates your hard skills and highlights your best achievements using narrative form.
- Core Competencies. Keeps the ATS happy by including the right keywords.
This approach is superior to a single-section format and will result in mode job interview invitations. I’ll explain why in a moment.
(Related: Resume Examples Australian Employers Love).
Why Your Resume Needs A Skills Section.
The skills section is the 3rd most important section on your resume, after your resume profile and your professional experience.
Above: An excellent skills section for a Project Management resume. Notice that it communicates hard skills explicitly while communicating soft skills both explicitly and via achievements.
Why? Two reasons:
- Companies use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to cull the large volume of resumes they receive. The skills section is one of the best places to elegantly include keywords that the ATS will be looking for.
- Recruiters use the skills section to verify whether you fit the role. For example, a recruiter looking to fill a Project Manager role will look for PMI Agile qualifications and knowledge of EVM and PERT techniques.
Did You know?
The skills section can have an indirect effect on your starting salary. Communicate your value more effectively, and you’ll have more leverage when negotiating your initial offer.
Hard Skills vs Soft Skills.
Let’s take a step back for a moment. Do you know what the difference between the hard and soft skills is? You may be surprised.
What Are Soft Skills?
Soft skills are the personal attributes or skills you use to manoeuvre through life. They are subjective and aren’t as easy to quantify.
Examples of soft skills that potential employers want to know about:
- Persuasive presenter.
- Effective active listener.
- Strong attention to detail.
- Creative problem-solver.
- Confident decision-maker.
The tricky part with soft skills is that you must showcase them indirectly. Explicitly listing them leads to a generic resume.
For example:
Above: This is what happens when you explicitly list your soft skills instead of hinting at them. Sounds like fluff, right?
Think of writing soft skills as flirting.
When you are single, you (hopefully) don’t approach a potential mate and blurt out that you’re a trustworthy, hard-working, attractive, honest individual who likes romantic walks on the beach.
Instead, you artfully insinuate these qualities by discussing your career successes and opening up about your failures.
Above: This is how you build a resume skills section that gets attention from recruiters.
Similarly, when writing your resume, focus on spotlighting achievements that would not have been possible without the skills you need to demonstrate.
The skills section of a B2B SaaS sales executive, above, demonstrates that he:
- Is a motivated hard worker (11-year track record of 15% overachievement speaks to this).
- Has strong stakeholder management skills (he used them to generate $15 of additional revenue in a complex deal).
- Has strong oral and written communication skills (duh).
- Is a team player with strong leadership skills (which is why he was chosen to mentor fresh blood).
In other words, the sales executive demonstrated the skills by showing what impact he achieved, rather than listing the skills he used.
Does that make sense?
What Are Hard Skills?
Hard skills are the technical skills you need to do a specific job. You may have heard people referring to them as job-related skills.
These are teachable and can be quantified through certifications (e.g., AWS Solutions Architect Associate) or skills tests during the recruitment process (e.g., English fluency exam).
Which hard skills should you put on your resume? Start here:
- Ability to operate physical equipment, machinery, hardware or manual processes (e.g., license to operate a tower crane).
- Proficiency in software, apps and digital tools for analysis, design and productivity (e.g., advanced MS Excel skills).
- Computer skills across the tech stack (e.g., deep knowledge of Ruby on Rails syntax).
- Level of fluency in a foreign language (e.g., ability to translate from German to Spanish).
- Specialised techniques such as scientific methods or mathematical modelling (e.g., experience with quadratic models for large signal applications).
- Knowledge of methodologies (e.g., ISO, Six Sigma) and professional standards.
How To Showcase Your Skills Through Achievements.
The CAR technique is an effective and straightforward way to communicate your skills in a way that captures recruiters’ hearts, minds, and eyes.
For each skill you’re seeking to highlight, begin by asking yourself these 3 questions:
- Challenge: what big challenges have you faced relative to this skill? Remember to span your career versus just your most recent role.
- Actions: what specific actions did you take to overcome those challenges? The key word here is specific.
- Results: what was the impact of your work? Consider the frequency and scale of your impact.
Here are two examples of this technique in action:
1. Marketing Manager.
Let’s say you want to tout your change management skills and SEO skills.
- A major challenge in your career involved a significant revenue shortfall at your company.
- The action you took was to initiate a policy change that freed up funds for direct marketing.
- The result was that you nearly eliminated the loss in less than a year.
It might turn out something like this:
2. HR Professional.
As a HR Manager, you want to showcase your leadership skills. Excellent.
- In one of your roles, your company was suffering from crippling attrition due to a lack of growth opportunities.
- Your action was to create a program that delineated career paths for various roles.
- The result was reduced attrition for hard-to-fill roles.
It might read like this:
2. Airline Ground Staff Co-Ordinator.
You work for Emirates and want to demonstrate your problem-solving skills.
- The Airline developed a reputation for losing and/or delaying luggage.
- Your action was to simplify the processes.
- The result was reduced higher efficiencies and more customers united with their bags.
It might read like this:
3 Resume Sections Where You Must Showcase Your Skills.
The skills section is not the only place you can showcase your skills.
You can (in fact, you must), hint at your skills throughout the other two most important sections of your resume – your profile and professional experience.
For example, when writing achievements for one of your previous roles, you could say:
Not bad. Definitely speaks to your communication, attention-to-detail skills, and PowerBI expertise.
But what if you took it a step further, and wrote this?
Whoa.
Now you’re also demonstrating your analysis and public speaking abilities (hard skills) as well as your ability to influence senior decision-makers, take initiative and nurture relationships (soft skills).
More powerful, right?
Top 5 Skills That Belong On (Almost) Every Resume.
Australian employers expect you to showcase skills from every category below.
Both hard and soft skills can be transferrable across multiple roles and industries — so there’s plenty of overlap in skills on resumes submitted by candidates.
Find your unique angle within these commonly sought-after skills ‘buckets’.
Important!
Make your resume stand out by thinking carefully about: 1) How your skills align with what the recruiter has asked for in the job ad and 2) The skills you can best prove through examples (both on your resume and if you get to the interview stage).
1. Communication Skills.
Communication is a core skill area, because almost every time we interact with another human being — it’s with the aim of communicating something.
There are many ways you can communicate well in different contexts, to add value to an employer:
- Oral communication, public speaking and presentation skills in meetings, events or podcasts.
- Written communication which may be formal, conversational, copywriting, or creative writing.
- Visual communication such as desktop publishing, slide decks, or even meme selection.
- Non-verbal communication, perhaps through training in body language, posture, or speech.
- Active listening, asking good questions, building rapport and showing empathy.
- Ability to interpret and integrate information from multiple sources.
- Ability to facilitate, negotiate, mediate, persuade, and lead discussions.
(Related: How To Showcase Communication Skills On Your Resume).
2. Problem-Solving Skills.
No matter where you work or the role you hold, you’ll need to spot issues, find solutions and fix problems (even if they’re minor ones).
Expert Tip.
Don’t explicitly claim that you possess “excellent problem-solving skills”. Instead, illustrate your skills by demonstrating how you used them to achieve an outcome (e.g., “reduced airline’s lost luggage rates by 14%.”
Recruiters highly value evidence of problem-solving skills on your resume, such as:
- Critical thinking, such as projects or tasks that involved developing questions/queries, research, interpretation, evaluation, collaboration with expert peers, prediction, and analysis.
- Complex problem solving, such as projects to gather and leverage data, overcoming major obstacles, or removing conflict among stakeholders.
- Creative problem solving, such as developing new product lines, pivoting to new business models and reducing costs through improved efficiency.
(Related: Resume Templates That Australian Employers Love).
3. Interpersonal/People Skills.
Workforces are comprised of human beings (even remote ones). Customers are human beings.
And all humans have distinct personalities and messy emotions — as much as we try to smooth the way with professional language and social etiquette.
Important!
Your resume must convey the sense that you’re a good-natured, well-rounded individual who won’t annoy or discomfit your colleagues, needlessly cause conflict and drama, or deter customers.
On your resume, look for opportunities to show you have:
- Great teamwork skills through how you’ve brought people together, provided motivation, used negotiation skills, been flexible when a project’s goals shifted.
- Customer service skills by assisting customers with problems, achieved feedback from satisfied customers, or delivered measurable improvement in customer experience metrics.
- Ability to lead with empathy by supporting your team to achieve a goal or develop professionally, or mediated conflict during an emotive high-pressure situation.
- An open mind, such as supporting initiatives that made a workplace more inclusive or creating outputs designed for/with people from diverse, multicultural backgrounds.
4. Management Skills.
The practical ability to organise people and resources to get tangible results shows you’re a skilled employee that can add value at any level — whether you hold a leadership role or not.
Management skills to mention on your resume:
- People management, such as forming and leading a team, consensus-building through collaborative projects or professional networks, or engaging customer stakeholder groups.
- Project management including developing tasks, budgets and timelines, keeping them on track, creating workflow procedures or systems, delegating and exception/risk management.
- Ability to manage yourself including goal setting, working independently, prioritisation, time management, and taking responsibility for your own professional development.
5. Adaptability Skills.
Also known as agility, versatility, and flexibility — adaptability has become a top skill broadly favoured by hiring managers.
Whether it’s the emergence of AI or even just a feature update to common software like Word, tools and techniques used in the workplace evolve often.
Examples of adaptability skills to include on your resume:
- Leading organisational or behavioural change initiatives, including formal change management programs and informal efforts like promoting recycling in the lunch room.
- Ability to identify new opportunities through market research, customer surveys/complaints, learnings from a project, or through a professional development experience.
- Ability to apply skills in different contexts, such as developing a cross-functional service offering, innovating on existing ideas or processes, or testing new concepts.
Above: You probably have more skills than you realise.
Skills That You Must Exclude From Your Resume.
Now that you’re skilled in skills, let’s discuss skills that don’t belong on your resume.
1. Skills You Don’t Possess.
While the readers of our blog are unquestionably people of integrity, a CareerBuilder survey reports that more than 75% of Australian HR managers have pinpointed a lie on a resume.
So, even if your intentions are good, resist the temptation to embellish or exaggerate your skills to get the job.
(Related Article: 7 Best Resume Builders In Australia).
Whether it means you get an interview and don’t perform – or, even worse, you get hired and aren’t sure what you’re doing.
Important!
The bottom line, tell the truth. And apply for jobs that don’t err too far on the edge of aspirational.
2. Obsolete Skills.
Still a whiz with MS-DOS, Lotus 1-2-3, or Vista? Keep it on the down-low. Technology changes by the day, and many great innovations have gone the way of the dinosaur.
Been out of the workforce for a while?
Ensure the skills you list on your resume are still current and in demand by employers.
3. Irrelevant Skills.
If your skills aren’t directly (or even remotely) related to the job you’re applying for, leave them off.
Maybe you use a certain sport, workout, or meditation technique to stay focused at work.
You feel it’s important for your future Australian employer to know how centered you are.
However, think twice before you waste a recruiter’s time citing your mindfulness practice, or your squash abilities. Save it for the interview.
4. Used and Abused Skills.
This list is a good depository of words that have been overused. Avoid at all costs when crafting your resume:
- Specialised.
- Experienced.
- Skilled.
- Passionate.
- Expert.
- Motivated.
- Creative.
- Strategic.
- Focused.
5. No-Brainer Skills.
The above list is also a poignant reminder that very employer already expects you to be ALL (or most) of those things.
So, why bother spelling them out?
Also, please don’t list “MS Office”, “email” or the “internet” as skills you possess. Now let’s move on to best practices for resume skills.
Irene
