The “Key Skills” section on your resume quickly tells the employer or recruiter about your area of ​​expertise and how you can help with the job requirement. Here is a short guide on key writing skills.

This section should appear before listing all of your work experience. An employer will decide if she should continue reading your resume after reading the list of key skills she has mentioned. Therefore, this section should provide a perfect summary of her knowledge and experience;

Remember that your resume is a marketing tool! If you’re shopping for a computer, the first thing you’d check about a model is its configuration: processor speed, amount of RAM, hard drive space, monitor size, etc. You look at the settings because it tells you what that brand of computer can do for you. Similarly, the key skills section tells about your basic setup.

If you’re not exactly sure where to put it, this is the most commonly used format:

Resume name and title

Career Objective

Summary

key skills

Professional experience

Education

Here’s an example of a “key skills” section of a software developer’s resume:

Technology:

JSP/Servlets, STRUTS, J2EE, EJB, JMS, MDB, AJAX, Web Service, JAXP, JDBC, Open Adapter, Socket, Thread, ODBC, ADO, LDAP, OCX, ActiveX, SMTP, SNMP, Socket, Hibernate, Spring, Swing, MQ series, OpenJMS, SOAP, SAAJ, SwiftMQ, DTS

Language:

Java, HTML/DHTML, XML, XSL, PL/SQL, Visual Basic, PHP, C, ProC, ASP, C#

Database:

Oracle, SQL server, Sybase, Informix, MySQL, MS Access, Foxpro

Application servers:

Tomcat, WebLogic, WebSphere, Interstage, IIS, Covalent, Netscape/iPlanet

Control Source:

VSS, CVS, Star Team, Changeman, Merant

Designs / Patterns:

UML, DFD, ER, Session Facade, Service Locator, DAO, DTO and Business Delegates

Others:

Eclipse, WSAD, Crystal Report, MS Visual Studio, P8 Filenet API, Open Reports, Crystal Clear Report Engine, Oracle Report, TeamWare Flow, iFlow, NetBeans, Cognos CRN/C8

Platforms:

Windows XP, NT, Solaris, HP-UX, DEC-Alpha, MS-DOS

As you can see in the example above, the key skills section conveys all the skills you have. If you are targeting a specific job requirement, it is best to modify this section to list the skills that are more specific to the job.

These are the things to avoid when writing down your key skills.

1. Do not stuff the section with keywords. Repeating a keyword or listing two abilities that mean the same thing are examples.

2. Decide on the optimal length and don’t make it too long or too short.

3. Never include a skill if you don’t have it.

If you have listed a skill, you should also add relevant information in your work experience to support it. If you have mentioned ‘SQL Server’ in your key skills, your work experience should say what you did in your job that requires SQL Server experience.