Skills to put on a resume in 2026: what employers rank, and how an ATS reads them

What skills do employers look for on a resume in 2026?

Teamwork, problem-solving and communication lead, and technical skills follow close behind. The US National Association of Colleges and Employers asks employers every year which attributes they look for on a candidate’s resume, and its 2026 spring update, surveyed between 12 February and 17 March 2026, is the most recent large answer to that question.

Of 163 employers, 85% named the ability to work in a team, 82% problem-solving, 78% verbal communication, 73% technical skills and 72% written communication. Work ethic, analytical skills, initiative, leadership potential and attention to detail all sit between 65% and 71%. AI skills are on the list too, named by 31%.

Two things to keep in mind when reading it. First, NACE surveys US employers that hire graduates, so the ranking leans toward early career hiring; an experienced hire is judged more on domain skills the survey does not list. Second, the 2026 edition was sponsored by Jobscan, a resume optimisation company.

LinkedIn’s own read of the market points the same way from a different angle. Its Skills on the Rise 2026 report, published on 24 February 2026, stopped publishing a single top-15 list and instead grouped the fastest-growing skills into clusters, under headings such as AI technical skills, process optimisation, communication and stakeholder management, financial acumen and team management. The pattern across both sources is the same: one cluster of skills that are specific to the work, and one cluster about how you work with people. A good resume needs evidence of both.

Which matter more, hard skills or soft skills?

Both, at different stages of the same process. The NACE ranking puts three soft skills at the top, which can read as an argument for filling the skills section with them. The recruiter data says the opposite about how candidates get found.

Jobscan’s 2025 survey of 384 recruiters found that 76.4% filter candidates by skills when they search their applicant database, ahead of education at 59.7% and job title at 55.3%. Nobody types “team player” into that search box. They type “Salesforce”, “IFRS 16” or “Python”. Hard skills are how you get found; soft skills are what the person who found you is looking for once they start reading.

That resolves the apparent contradiction. Let named hard skills carry the skills section, because that is where software and searches look. Let soft skills appear where a reader can believe them, attached to something you did.

How to list skills on a resume

One section, a plain heading, the most relevant skills first, and a short list of groups once you pass about ten. Here is the shape that works for most roles.

SKILLS
Analysis:   SQL (BigQuery, Postgres), Python (pandas), Excel modelling
Reporting:  Looker, Tableau, dbt
Methods:    A/B testing, cohort analysis, forecasting
Languages:  English (native), Spanish (professional working)

• Order by relevance to this posting. The first three skills are the ones a skimming recruiter reads. Put the ones the job ad mentions first.
• Group past ten. Categories such as “Analysis” or “Tools” make a long list readable and show breadth at a glance. Keep each group to one line.
• Add the detail that makes a skill specific. “Python (pandas, three years in production)” tells a reader far more than “Python”. This is exactly the “specific skills” NACE’s employers asked for.
• Repeat your top skills in the summary. Two or three of them, in a sentence, at the top of the page. It is the first thing a reader sees and costs nothing.
• Keep the heading standard. “Skills”, “Technical skills” or “Core skills”. A creative heading can stop a parser from recognising the section.

Choosing which skills to put first is the same exercise as tailoring the whole resume, covered step by step in how to tailor your resume to a job description, and the words to use are in resume keywords.

How do you prove your skills on a resume?

You attach each one to something you did, with a result. This is the single most useful finding in the 2026 employer data.

Asked how they want candidates to present skills, 59% of 161 employers chose specific skills with examples, 23% general skills with examples, 16.1% a list of specific skills, and 1.9% a list of general skills. Put the two “with examples” answers together and 82% of employers want proof. A bare list of general skills is what almost nobody asked for.

In practice, the skill goes into a bullet as an action and an outcome:

The proven versions never use the word “communication” or “problem-solving”, and they demonstrate both. They also carry the hard skills a search will look for. Name the tool in the skills section, then show it working in a bullet.

What skills should you put on a resume with no experience?

The same ones, proven with different evidence. Without job titles to carry the page, the skills section and the bullets under projects, coursework, volunteering and part-time work do the selling, so put the skills section high, directly under the summary.

• Coursework and projects. Name the tool and the output. “Built a sales dashboard in Excel and Power BI from 12 months of store data for a marketing module” proves two hard skills and some analysis in one line.
• Part-time and volunteer work. Customer-facing jobs prove the skills at the top of the NACE ranking. “Ran the till and the closing cash count alone on weekend shifts” shows reliability and attention to detail without using either word.
• Certificates you can finish in weeks. A vendor certificate in a tool the posting names is a hard skill with a date attached.

This matters most for graduates, because the NACE survey is about them: these are employers hiring people at the start of a career, and 82% of them want skills shown with examples. A first resume that lists “teamwork, communication, problem-solving” with nothing behind them is the format 1.9% asked for. Where to look for that first job is covered in job search tools for new graduates.

Career changers have the opposite problem: plenty of experience, described in the vocabulary of the old job. Keep the facts and change the words. A teacher moving into training design already has curriculum design, needs analysis and assessment design, which are the terms a learning and development posting uses. O*NET’s transferable skills category describes exactly this kind of skill, one that carries across occupations, and it is the part of your skills section worth rewriting first.

What skills should you leave off your resume?

• Skills every applicant has. Email, web browsing, Microsoft Word for an office role. Listing them suggests you have little else to list, unless the posting names them explicitly.
• Adjectives. “Hard-working”, “detail-oriented”, “passionate”. They are claims about character, and they cannot be searched or checked.
• Technology nobody runs any more. It dates you and takes space from something current. Keep it only if the posting asks for legacy experience.
• Skills you could not discuss in an interview. If a question about it would expose that you used it once, it is costing you more than it earns.
• Self-ratings. Stars, bars and percentages. They vanish in parsing and mean nothing to a reader.

Frequently asked questions

Check that your skills survive the parser

Run your resume through the ATS preview, which is free and needs no account, and read the skills a parser actually extracts. If one you rely on is missing, it is invisible to every recruiter search. Then match your skills to each posting with the ATS resume checker. Weekly plans start at €5 on the pricing page, with a 3-day money-back window and no free plan.

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