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Key Skills for Your CV: List & Examples

Samuel Johns, CPRW | By | Reviewed by Geoffrey R. Scott, CPRW

When writing your CV, include key CV skills so that employers can quickly see you’re qualified for the job.

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Types of skills to put on a CV

There are two types of skills you should put on your CV:

  1. Soft skills
  2. Hard skills

Soft skills are also known as personal skills. These are the skills you pick up in your everyday life. For example, you pick up soft skills by interacting with your friends, dealing with homework, introducing yourself to strangers, and prioritising tasks.

Hard skills are technical skills. You learn hard skills by studying specific courses (for example, an NVQ in hairdressing or by getting a driving licence) or through experience (like learning how to use WordPress at work).

When you write your CV, include a balance of hard and soft skills to show you’d be a well-rounded employee.

Even if you’re applying for a technical position, like a software engineer role, employers want to see you have good personal skills. Skills like communication, organisation, and prioritisation show an employer they can trust you to interact well with customers and your coworkers in addition to handling your workload.

How to identify skills for your CV

Unsure what skills you can put on your own CV? Follow these tips to identify relevant hard and soft skills:

Look at the job advert

Identifying skills for your CV is straightforward if you have the job advert in front of you. Employers list the skills they’re looking for in the job description, so you can simply add these skills to your CV skills section (assuming you have those skills).

Here’s an example of a job advert with the employer’s desired skills highlighted:

Example job advert with CV skills underlined.

If you were applying for this job, you’d ideally add some of these skills to your CV:

  • Presentation skills
  • Customer service skills
  • Point of sales systems (till)

Research the skills required for similar jobs

If you still need other skills to put on your CV, look at job descriptions for other related job openings. There’s a good chance similar job descriptions will reveal additional skills valuable to the position you’re applying for.

For example, if you’re applying for a barista role at Coffee Republic, check out job descriptions for server roles at Costa Coffee and Pret A Manger.

Determine the kind of skills these other employers are looking for, and if you have them, add them to your own CV.

Think about your previous experiences

Beyond the job advert, you should also add any other key skills you think would make you a good fit for the role you’re applying for.

For example, the job listing might not list communication skills, but they’re still a key skill for interacting with colleagues and clients.

To identify skills you’ve picked up throughout your life, reflect on your past experiences.

If you’re writing a CV as a 16-year-old or never had a proper job, you can think about volunteer roles or extracurricular activities. For example, if you completed Duke of Edinburgh’s award, you can list some of the skills you learnt, like leadership skills and public speaking.

You might have also mastered valuable skills at a university society, particularly if you were an elected committee member. If not, even being a regular member of a society like St John Ambulance Society teaches you valuable teamwork skills that you can list on your CV.

How to list skills on your CV

Once you’ve established a CV skills list, here’s how to highlight them on your CV:

Include your most impressive skills in your personal statement

The top of your CV, just below your name, is the most valuable part of your CV. That’s because it’s where recruiters naturally look first. Put that space to good use by adding a CV personal statement under your name.

Then, showcase your skills in your personal statement. The most effective way to showcase your skills is to demonstrate how you applied them to solve a problem. This is called the PAR method:

  • Problem: Identify a responsibility or issue at work
  • Action: Discuss how you addressed the problem
  • Results: What was the outcome of that action

For example, if you want to prove your organisational skills, say you noticed your office’s filing system was inefficient (the problem), so you re-organised it (the action) so that people could find the files they were looking for faster (the result). Here are some examples of the PAR method in action in a CV personal statement:

Developed new filing system, saving the company £1,470 per year in labour expenses.

Spearheaded new strategy to ensure customers didn’t allow their contracts to lapse, resulting in a 5% reduction in contract cancellations.

Use your CV skills section to highlight other skills and relevant certifications

Your CV skills section is another key place to showcase your talents.

A CV skills section is usually a single- or double-column list of the skills you identified in the job description. For example, a primary school teacher’s skills section might look like this:

A primary school teacher's CV skills section.
Skills for a teaching CV.

Include a mix of personal and technical skills to show that you’re a well-rounded applicant.

Reference your skills in your work history section

As well as listing your skills in your skills section, you should show how you applied those skills for previous employers in your CV’s work history bullet points.

As well as using the PAR (problem, action, result) method shown above, add hard numbers to your bullet points to put your skills in the context of the achievements you’ve made.

For example, here’s how a potential estate agent might present their negotiating skills:

  • Attended negotiating workshop to learn new techniques for closing deals, leading to a 7% increase in sales for the firm annually

Numbers are easy to find. Here are some ideas on how to find numbers to back up your CV skills:

  • Number of customers served per hour/day
  • Percentage increase in sales
  • Number of people you trained
  • Number of activities you organised (if you’re on a university society committee, for instance)
  • Your personal customer satisfaction rate

List of skills for your CV by industry

Here’s a list of common CV skills by industry if you’re still struggling to decide what to add to your CV.

Administration and Office Support

  • Time management
  • Event planning
  • Scheduling
  • Organisational skills
  • Data protection/GDPR compliance
  • Problem solving
  • Attention to detail
  • Adaptability/flexibility
  • Written/oral communication
  • Technology skills (specify software packages you can use like Microsoft Access)
  • Interpersonal skills
  • People skills
  • Prioritisation

Customer Service

  • Communication skills
  • Technical skills (for example, LiveChat and Blazedesk)
  • Interpersonal skills
  • Problem solving
  • Research skills
  • Patience
  • Diplomacy
  • Negotiation skills
  • Empathy
  • Product/service knowledge
  • Time management
  • Adaptability
  • Software skills (Kayako and Zendesk)
  • Language skills (French, German, Welsh)

Marketing

Nursing

  • Time management
  • Professionalism
  • Critical thinking skills
  • Communication skills
  • Bedside manner
  • NHS Constitution
  • Medicine administration
  • Overseeing health care assistants
  • Performing diagnostic tests
  • Preventative care strategies
  • IV administration
  • Empathy
  • Safeguarding
  • Emotional resilience

Sales

  • Verbal/written communication skills
  • Public speaking
  • Presentation skills
  • Listening skills
  • Computer skills
  • Time management
  • Goal orientation
  • Patience
  • Diplomacy
  • Persistence
  • Confidence
  • Interpersonal skills

Teaching

Waiter/Barista

  • Salesmanship
  • Problem solving
  • Point of sale (POS) system operation
  • Good memory
  • Language skills
  • Customer service skills
  • Cleaning skills
  • Conflict resolution
  • Maths skills
  • Hygiene/HACCP

Delivery

  • Clean driving licence (remember to include which category of driving licence you have)
  • Lifting ability (for heavy items)
  • Vehicle maintenance
  • Route planning
  • Sat Nav system operation
  • Time management skills
  • Safety-first approach (for example, Pass Plus)
  • Customer service skills
  • Communication skills
  • Working under pressure
  • Recording mileage
  • Maintaining delivery records
  • Defensive driving
Samuel Johns, CPRW

Written by Samuel Johns, CPRW

Samuel Johns is a Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) and career counsellor on the CV Genius team. He has helped countless job hunters craft high-quality CVs and... more

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