Technical Skills for Resumes: Examples and What to Include

What are technical skills?

Technical skills are abilities specific to a certain role, industry, sector, or field. These competencies aren’t innate and must be taught, like programming languages, market analysis, or keyword research.

What’s the difference between technical skills and hard skills? Hard skills are an umbrella term that encompasses all abilities that must be taught, including skills like planning and negotiation, which aren’t industry-specific. Whereas technical skills are a subset of hard skills that relate specifically to one industry or role.

Keep in mind that many professionals use these terms interchangeably, so job descriptions may use both hard skills and technical skills for any abilities that aren’t soft skills.

The role of technical skills in the job market

Professionals need keen technical skills to complete any job role successfully. This makes them critical to hiring managers looking to fill an open role. Thousands of candidates for an editor position may have strong communication skills, but solid computer literacy and grammar skills are vital.

Technical skills are always important, but just how important they are depends on the industry. A surgeon needs to know specialist surgical techniques, along with the ability to read medical charts, but soft skills are less important. Emotional intelligence and problem solving stil contribute to their skill set, but don’t need to be showcased.

However, HR professionals benefit from displaying a mix of hard and soft skills to show people-centric management skills like empathy and conflict resolution, alongside technical skills like human resource information system (HRIS) competency.

Incorporating technical skills in a resume

Let’s start with the most obvious choice: place your most important technical skills in the Skills section of your resume. We recommend adding five to 10 total skills, with slightly more technical and hard skills than soft skills.

Another great place to show off your technical skills is in the Work Experience section. Describe past work achievements that used your technical skills to show the hiring manager the impact your skills had on real, tangible events. This method of Show, Don’t Tell is a strong method to prove your qualifications.

Your resume is all about your professional experience, so anywhere you talk about yourself is an opportunity to incorporate your technical skills. For example, mentioning your expertise with the Agile methodology in your summary relays your competency at the very beginning of your resume.

Check out our resume samples for more realistic ways to incorporate technical skills into an application.

“Technical skills are always important, but just how important they are depends on the industry.”

Examples of technical skills for resumes

Now, let’s take a look at some in-demand technical skills across varied industries. The exact skills you need to display depend on specific job descriptions, but these general ideas should get you thinking.

Here are our top vital technical skills, sorted by industry:

Project management skills:

• Risk management
• Project management tools, including Monday.com, JIRA, and Asana
• Scrum methodology
• Agile methodology
• Budget planning
• Stakeholder management

Business analysis skills:

• Data analysis
• Business intelligence tools, including SAP BusinessObjects and Microsoft Power Bi
• Process modeling
• Prototyping and wireframing
• Requirements management
• Programming knowledge

Supply chain management skills:

• Supply management software
• Quality control methodologies
• Industrial automation
• Inventory management
• Logistics

Customer service skills:

• Data entry
• Data analysis
• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems
• Email management software
• Telesales, Cross-sales, and Up-sales

Programming skills:

• JavaScript
• C++
• C#
• Python
• Go
• Ruby

Healthcare skills:

• Medical billing
• Administering medication
• Reading medical charts
• Remote patient monitoring and telehealth
• Electronic health records (EHR) systems
• Medical imaging software

Marketing skills:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media platforms
• Marketing automation tools, including Marketo and HubSpot
• Marketing analytics
• Content management systems (CMS)
• Copywriting
• Google Analytics
• Content creation

Accounting skills:

• Bookkeeping software
• Financial statement analysis
• Knowledge of compliance and regulations
• Tax compliance
• Data visualization

Food service skills:

• Point of service (POS) systems
• Food safety and sanitation
• Menu knowledge
• Food preparation
• Inventory management
• Cash handling

The impact of technical skills on job applications

Technical skills have a massive impact on your resume. Including desirable, relevant technical skills ensures your resume passes a company’s applicant tracking system (ATS) and ends up in the hiring manager’s inbox.

The right skills and competencies on your application tell the system your resume is a fit. Without an ATS resume, you aren’t likely to ever talk with the recruiter, despite your perfect qualifications. 

Technical skills also help catch the hiring manager’s attention. These professionals look through hundreds of resumes per week and they can really start to blend together. All recruiters want is a professional who matches the job description, and they won’t know you’re perfect for the role unless you showcase your relevant skills.

This is especially important in today’s competitive job market. With thousands of workers going after the same role as you, it’s vital to have something special to raise you above the rest and help your application stand out from the crowd.

Pro tips for highlighting technical skills in a resume

Let’s finish this guide up with a few actionable tips to help your resume shine. These are nice extra touches that make a big difference and help make your application memorable.

• Use quantified achievements: Metrics and numbers give your achievements, and therefore your technical skills, a tangible outcome the hiring manager can understand. Saying that you implemented a new CRM is great, but adding that it “improved efficiency by 10%” is outstanding.
• Make the resume easy to read: Recruiters read hundreds of resumes and only spend seconds on each one, so ensure you leave plenty of white space so it's easy on the eyes. It shows respect to the hiring manager and ensures your resume gets read.
• Use the right layout: An excellent resume template makes a great first impression, structuring your qualifications attractively and professionally.
• Tailor resumes to each opening: It seems simple to copy/paste your resume and send the same one to each job opening, but you won’t get many callbacks. Make sure each resume is edited to match the specific job description, and you’ll display targeted relevance.

Showcase technical skills that impress

Technical skills are vital to every job, so it pays to display them correctly. Relay your competencies clearly, and you can prove your qualifications and land that interview. Just use our tips:

• Show technical skills in a variety of ways, including the Skills section, Work Experience section, and Resume Summary
• Research your role and industry to discover how important technical skills are and which ones to include
• Tailor each resume specifically to show relevance and make them ATS-friendly

Time to put these tips to use. Try CVwizard’s resume maker and craft a professional resume easily with a drag-and-drop interface and customizable section headers.