How many skills should I list

Enough to cover the work and few enough to be read. Eight to fourteen suits most people. The check here passes the skills test at three distinct entries, so the floor is low and the ceiling is your reader's patience.

How should the entries be separated

Commas, semicolons, bullets, pipes or one per line all work. The checker splits on those marks and counts entries of five words or fewer, so a paragraph of prose under a Skills heading may not be read as a list at all.

Should I rate my own skills

Star ratings and percentage bars mean nothing outside your own head, and the graphical versions often extract as unreadable characters. Words are safer and more honest.

Do I repeat skills that already appear in my experience

A short list of the main ones, yes. It gives a scanning reader a single place to look. Repeating every term from every bullet point adds length without adding evidence.

What about skills I have not used for years

Leave them out, or group them under a heading such as Earlier tools. A list that implies current fluency you no longer have is a difficult first ten minutes of an interview.

Guide · Résumé

The skills section, and how a parser reads it

A skills section is a list a reader scans in two seconds and a parser splits on punctuation. Here is how to write one that survives both.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— put down what you could be asked about.

The skills section is the one part of a résumé that is genuinely a list. A reader scans it in about two seconds to see whether you are in the right territory. A parser splits it on punctuation and counts what comes out. Both of them are served by the same plain formatting.

What belongs on the list

Things you could be asked about without wincing. Tools, languages, systems, methods, equipment, regulations, the named processes of your trade. If someone opened an interview by asking you to talk for two minutes about an item on your list, every item should survive that.

How long it should be

Eight to fourteen entries covers most careers. A list of forty stops being information and becomes wallpaper, and it invites the question of which five you actually use. Group them if the range is wide: languages, then infrastructure, then the domain-specific ones.

How the parser splits it

The ATS checker takes the text under a recognised skills heading and splits it on commas, semicolons, bullets, pipes and line breaks. Each fragment of five words or fewer that contains letters counts as one entry. Three or more entries pass the skills check, which is fifteen points of the completeness dimension.

Two consequences follow. A skills section written as a sentence may not be read as a list, because the fragments are too long. And a heading with nothing beneath it fails twice: it earns no completeness points and it costs parseability, because the rules also look for headings that have real content under them.

Headings that are recognised

Skills, Technical skills, Core competencies, Technologies, Tech stack, and Tools work. Something inventive may read well to a person and go unrecognised by the section rules, which is a small cost you can decide to pay. The format guide covers the same question for every other section.

Ratings, bars and stars

A five-star rating of your own SQL is a number with no scale behind it. Worse, the graphics used to draw those bars often extract as decorative characters, and decorative characters cost eight points of parseability in the check here. Where you want to show depth, write it in words: "Python, day to day for six years" carries more than four filled circles.

Where the evidence actually lives

A list proves nothing on its own. The skill becomes credible in the experience section, where it appears inside a line that says what it was used for and what changed. Write the experience lines first and let the skills section be the index to them rather than a claim standing by itself.

In the builder

In the résumé builder skills are their own section with a count in the rail, so you can see at a glance how many entries the document holds. The field suggests and searches as you type, which mostly saves you from spelling a tool three different ways across one page. Consistency matters here for a dull reason: a parser matching text treats two spellings as two different things, and so does a person skimming for one word.

Grouping a long list

When the range is wide, group the entries under short labels on their own lines: languages, then infrastructure, then domain tools. Each group is still a list separated by commas, so the splitting is unaffected, and a reader gets a structure instead of a wall. Three groups is usually the limit before the grouping itself becomes the thing being read.

Put the group that matches the posting first. That is the cheapest tailoring move available, it takes ten seconds, and it changes what a scanning reader sees in the two seconds they give this section. The tailoring guide covers the rest of the pass.

Keeping it honest

Every entry on the list is a small promise, and the interview is where the promises are collected. A tool you used for a fortnight two years ago is not a skill; it is a thing you have seen. Where you want to keep it, mark the level in words rather than dropping it silently into a list that implies fluency. A shorter list you can defend completely is stronger than a long one with three entries you are quietly hoping nobody asks about.

Build the list in the editor

Skills are their own section, counted in the rail, and the field suggests and searches as you type.

Open the résumé builder Check how many entries it finds

Questions

How many skills should I list: Enough to cover the work and few enough to be read. Eight to fourteen suits most people. The check here passes the skills test at three distinct entries, so the floor is low and the ceiling is your reader's patience.
How should the entries be separated: Commas, semicolons, bullets, pipes or one per line all work. The checker splits on those marks and counts entries of five words or fewer, so a paragraph of prose under a Skills heading may not be read as a list at all.
Should I rate my own skills: Star ratings and percentage bars mean nothing outside your own head, and the graphical versions often extract as unreadable characters. Words are safer and more honest.
Do I repeat skills that already appear in my experience: A short list of the main ones, yes. It gives a scanning reader a single place to look. Repeating every term from every bullet point adds length without adding evidence.
What about skills I have not used for years: Leave them out, or group them under a heading such as Earlier tools. A list that implies current fluency you no longer have is a difficult first ten minutes of an interview.

Conxfolio is a free set of four career tools: a résumé builder with 37 rendered layouts, an ATS résumé checker that prints its own arithmetic, a cover letter builder that traces every proof paragraph back to the line it came from, and a portfolio builder with 20 authored designs. There is no account to create, nothing is held back for a paid plan, and no language model is used anywhere in the product, so the readers, the score and the letter are deterministic code you can check.