AI Résumé Skills Generator

A résumé's skills section is where you show potential employers you have the abilities needed to succeed in a role. The skills you put on your résumé should include a mix of hard and soft skills and reflect the requirements and tasks specified in the job description. Put the most important or relevant skills first.

Employers and recruiters look at your résumé's skills section to see if you’re a good fit for an open position, so it’s important to put thought into the skills you include. If you don’t know where to start, consider using a tool—such as Grammarly’s AI-powered résumé skills generator—that can help you quickly create a list of job-specific résumé skills.

Include a mix of technical skills and soft skills on your résumé.

Technical skills, a.k.a. hard skills, are acquired through education, training, or work experience. For example, you may have extensive experience using Adobe Creative Suite or have an AWS certification. Soft skills, a.k.a. interpersonal skills, speak to aspects of your personality or work style—examples include “collaboration expertise,” “time management,” and “communication skills.”

Though it may be tempting to list all your skills, it’s best to include only those most relevant to the job you’re applying for.

You should generally choose five to ten skills to add to your résumé. In rare instances, when you’re applying for a highly technical role, you may wish to include a few more than ten skills, but remember you can indirectly show off skills in other parts of your résumé. For example, if you talk about how you’ve worked cross-functionally in the experience section of your résumé, employers will deduce that you have collaboration skills.

It’s typically a good idea to include a few soft skills on your résumé, but this depends on the role you’re applying for. If you’re applying for a job that requires a high degree of interpersonal interaction, such as a customer service role, your résumé skills section should focus heavily on soft skills. If you’re applying for a more technical position, you can include a couple of soft skills but should primarily focus on your technical skills.

Here are a few examples of skills that may harm your job candidacy more than they help it:

Basic skills: There’s no need to include skills on your résumé that most people possess. For example, you don’t need to mention “typing” or “Google Docs.” Employers assume most candidates will have fluency in these areas.

Irrelevant skills: Though you may have a wide variety of skills, you should include only ones relevant to the job for which you’re applying. For example, if you’re applying for an accounting position, you don’t need to mention the video editing skills you picked up as a hobbyist.

Exaggerated skills: Be as upfront as possible about the skills you possess. If you studied Spanish in high school but now only know basic words like “frijoles” and “tortillas,” don’t list “Spanish” as a skill on your resume. Filling out your résumé with added abilities may feel tempting, but claiming ones you don’t truly have could become an issue later on.

A résumé skills tool helps you create a list of skills to put on your résumé. All you need to do is enter a relevant prompt with information about your work experience and the job for which you're applying, and the résumé skills tool generates a list of skills for you. You can try a tool—such as Grammarly’s AI writing assistance—to help speed up your résumé creation.

When using Grammarly’s AI assistance to help you create a list of résumé skills, it’s best to provide a good amount of information. The more detailed your prompts are, the clearer and more personalized your list of skills will be. To start, be sure to include the following information in your prompt:

- Specific details about your past work experience

- Specific details about the role you’re applying for

- Your desired formatting, e.g., “a bulleted list of five to ten skills that are each one to three words long”

It's simple to create a comprehensive list of résumé skills in an instant with Grammarly's AI writing assistance. Here's how:

• First, download Grammarly.
  
• From your document, open Grammarly. This will launch our generative AI features.
  
• Then, enter a prompt with instructions and key information that helps personalize your list of résumé skills.