On sourcing: every recommendation below comes from university career services or a government employment agency — institutions with no resume product to sell. Where the underlying research disagrees, this guide says so instead of picking the answer that reads better. One thing you will not find here is a claim that graphical skill bars hurt your chances specifically: no credible source we could find says that about bars, so the guide makes the narrower claim the evidence supports.
The honest answer on placement
There is one clear institutional recommendation to put the section near the top. Western Connecticut State University's career centre writes that the skills section "typically goes directly below the Profile (Summary) section because you want it to be one of the first things the employer notices" (WCSU Career Success Center).
That is one university, and we are not going to inflate it into a consensus. What career services state far more consistently is the underlying principle: lead with whatever makes your case fastest. The UK's National Careers Service applies it to the education section — "You can add this after the introduction if you're early in your career or do not have much work experience. If you have a lot of work experience, you might want to change the order and show off your work history and experience first" (National Careers Service). Sinclair College says it about sections generally: "Based on your skills, education, and experience, the headings may go in a different order" (Sinclair College Career Development).
Applied to skills, that gives a usable rule. Place the section above your experience when the skills are the thing being hired — a specific stack, a language, laboratory techniques, a certification — or when your recent work history does not yet argue for the role. Place it below when your job titles and results are the strongest evidence you have, which for most people with a few relevant years is the case.
One under-discussed option is not having the section at all. Sinclair puts it directly: "If you use a summary, you do not need a Skills section because your skills should already be outlined in your summary." If your skills block only repeats your summary, it is taking space that a result could occupy.
The research on section order does not settle it
It is worth knowing how thin the ground is here, because a lot of confident advice is written as though it were solid.
The peer-reviewed review of the resume research literature describes two studies pointing in opposite directions: "An early study of professional recruiters assessing experimentally manipulated resumes by Penrose (1973) found no order effects when varying resume components while holding content constant… Conversely, subsequent research by Schramm and Dortch (1991) found that more than 80% of their sample of on-campus recruiters reported that the order in which resume items appeared was of some degree of importance" (Risavy, 2017, Journal of Educational and Developmental Psychology).
The same review lists as an open question whether the usual ordering even holds for people who are not students or recent graduates. So: order plausibly matters, the size of the effect is unestablished, and most of what exists studied campus recruiting decades ago. Spend your effort on the contents.
What belongs in the section: hard skills
Here the advice is close to unanimous across institutions and countries.
Virginia Tech is the bluntest: "Your skills section should focus on technical/computer skills only. Do not include soft skills here, as your soft skills should be represented in the bullet points of your experiences" (Pamplin College of Business Career Services).
UC Santa Barbara draws the same line and explains the reasoning: "A targeted Skills section traditionally contains technical, language, or laboratory skill-related information, though it can contain additional specific abilities or areas of knowledge that are relevant to the position", and "Rarely should a Skills section include broad interpersonal aptitudes, because they are widely overused by applicants and lack concrete evidence" (UCSB Career Services).
WCSU adds two mechanical rules that are easy to get wrong: the section "is meant for 'Hard Skills' and not subjective adjectives of who you think you are", and "All skills always need to be spelled out and there should not be any abbreviations." Spelling them out matters for machine reading too — MIT's career office warns against abbreviating relevant keywords because software "may not properly consider it" (MIT CAPD).
Where the soft skills go instead
Not into the section, and not into the bin either — into evidence.
The University of Georgia's career centre gives the constructive version: "You can also embed your soft skills in the bullet points of your experiences, which increases the likelihood that your reader recognizes those skills and provides evidence that you have put them into practice" (UGA Career Center). Columbia's engineering resume guidance says the same, naming leadership, teamwork, communication, critical thinking and planning as things to demonstrate in bullets rather than list (Columbia Center for Career Education).
Sinclair College shows the rewrite that makes it concrete: instead of "Good communication skills", write "Over 7 years of Call Center experience, both inbound and outbound calling." Its blanket rule is worth adopting — "Do not include subjective words that do not have a clear definition, like 'good', 'excellent', or 'strong'."
Germany's federal employment agency goes further still and moves them out of the document: "Soft skills such as teamwork, resilience, or customer focus do not need to be listed in your resume and are better mentioned in your cover letter" (Bundesagentur für Arbeit). If you are applying in the German market, that is the local expectation rather than a stylistic opinion.
Show proficiency in words, not pictures
If a skill needs a level attached, career services describe how — and it is text every time.
UGA suggests a parenthetical directly after the skill name, drawn from a scale of "beginner, familiar, intermediate, proficient, advanced, expert", with examples like "Adobe InDesign/Photoshop (Advanced)" and "R (Beginner)". It also offers a convention that keeps the list readable: assume that a skill with no parenthetical means you are proficient enough to do the job with it, and label only the exceptions.
UCSB proposes a similar general scale — "Basic Knowledge" or "Familiarity", "Proficient" or "Accomplished", "Advanced Knowledge" or "Expertise" — and a dedicated one for languages: "Basic Knowledge," "Conversational," "Proficient," "Fluent," and "Bilingual."
What none of them suggests is a bar, a star rating or a filled circle. To be precise about why: we could not find a career service or ATS vendor that names graphical skill bars as a problem, so we are not going to invent that claim. What is documented is the category they belong to. CareerOneStop, run under the US Department of Labor, tells applicants to "Avoid using tables, text boxes, logos, columns, images, and graphics, as ATS may scramble the content" (CareerOneStop); MIT advises avoiding "graphics, icons, or images"; and Greenhouse lists "Resumes that include graphics, photos, or word art" among the things that commonly break its parser (Greenhouse Support). A skill bar is a graphic. It also conveys less than the word "Advanced" does, and takes more space doing it.
See what your resume is missing — before you apply.
CVder reads the job posting and your resume side by side, then shows the exact terms to add and the formatting a parser would trip on.
The format that survives a parser
The skills block is the part of a resume most often set in columns, because a list of short items looks tidy that way. That is the layout most likely to cause trouble.
CareerOneStop is explicit about the mechanism: "Since ATS systems scan resumes left to right, start with a simple, single-column layout so your resume is read accurately." It permits a modest amount of structure — "Use only plain black dot bullets, solid circles, open circles, or solid squares", and "Bars ( | ) may also be used to separate items in a section" — which is enough to format a skills list densely without a table. Greenhouse independently names "Resumes that have a columned layout" and "Complex resumes with tables, headers, and footers" as parse-failure causes; our two-column guide covers what actually goes wrong.
One thing that does not work, and CareerOneStop says it plainly: "Putting extra keywords in a white font on your resume will not 'trick' an ATS."
A last caution for career changers, who are the group most often advised to lead with skills. CareerOneStop warns that a fully skills-led format has a cost: "A functional format emphasizes skills and experience, with little detail on work history. However, without a detailed work history, the resume may be misinterpreted by employers, or rejected by applicant tracking systems (ATS), used by many employers to screen applications." Moving the skills section up is a much safer change than deleting your work history.
Q.Does skills-based hiring change any of this?
You will read that hiring has shifted to skills and that the section therefore deserves more prominence. The best available research on that shift is more sober. A 2024 study by Harvard Business School's Project on Managing the Future of Work and the Burning Glass Institute examined employers that had removed degree requirements and found the practical effect small: "for all its fanfare, the increased opportunity promised by Skills-Based Hiring has borne out in not even 1 in 700 hires last year" (Burning Glass Institute / HBS).
There is a second twist. The largest employer in the United States defines skills-based hiring as moving weight away from the resume: OPM describes it as a shift "from what applicants say on a resume to what applicants can do, demonstrated through proven, competency-based assessments" (OPM). Read that way, the trend is an argument for being able to demonstrate a skill, not for listing more of them.
- Place the section high when the skills are the qualification — technical, laboratory or language roles — and below experience when your work history is the stronger argument.
- The evidence on section order is split: one study found no order effects, another found recruiters said order mattered, and the question is still open for non-students.
- Hard skills only. Career services across three countries agree that broad interpersonal traits do not belong in the section.
- Put soft skills in your experience bullets as evidence — or, in the German market, in the cover letter.
- Use words for proficiency, not bars. No source names skill bars specifically, but bars are graphics, and graphics are documented as a parsing risk.
- Single column, plain bullets, no tables; pipes are a safe separator; white-font keywords do not work.
- If you already have a summary that covers your skills, you may not need the section at all.
- For which terms to use for your role, see resume keywords by role; for the tailoring step that matches them to a posting, see tailoring your resume.