Where these skills lists come from
Most skills generators are a black box: type a title, receive a list, wonder who decided it. This one is transparent because the sources are ours. The lists are built from the 36 complete example resumes we wrote and maintain for real job titles — each one a full resume with a curated skills section — combined with the same 260+ term skills lexicon that powers our keyword tools. For every role, the generator takes the example's skills section, then sweeps the rest of that resume — summary, work bullets, projects — through the lexicon to pick up skills the example demonstrates in prose but never lists. Across all roles that comes to 270+ distinct skills, every count on this page computed from the live dataset at build time, so nothing here can drift from what the tool actually returns.
Two honest limits. First, if we don't cover your title, the tool says so and gives you a deliberately general starting set rather than inventing a specific one — pasting the job posting is the fix, because posting-derived skills are real regardless of title coverage. Second, no generator knows what you can actually do. Every list here is a menu of what employers expect, not a set of claims you are entitled to make. Keep what is true, cut the rest.
A worked example: data analyst
Here is the exact output for "data analyst" with no posting pasted — generated by the same engine the tool above runs, at the moment this page was built:
Hard skills
- SQL
- Python
- Pandas
- Excel
- Statistics
- Tableau
- Looker
- Power BI
- A/B testing
- Cohort analysis
- Metric design
- Data storytelling
- Training & development
Soft skills
- Leadership
- Communication
- Teamwork
- Problem solving
Notice the shape. Hard skills dominate, and they are specific: named tools (Tableau, Power BI) and named techniques (cohort analysis, A/B testing), not vague categories like "data skills." The soft list is short on purpose. That ratio — specific and hard-skill-heavy, with a handful of soft skills — is what a strong skills section looks like in nearly every field, and it is the shape the generator produces for all 36 roles.
Your edit pass on a list like this takes two minutes: delete what is not true of you, reorder so the skills your target jobs screen for come first, and group the survivors under two or three short headings the way the data analyst example does. Grouping is not cosmetic — it lets a recruiter answer three different questions about you in one glance.
Hard skills, soft skills, and what each must survive
The two halves of the output face different tests. Hard skills face a search test: applicant tracking systems and recruiters search resumes for exact terms, so a hard skill earns its slot by matching the words real postings use — which is why the generator returns canonical forms an ATS will recognize rather than creative synonyms.
Soft skills face a proof test: nobody was ever hired for the word "leadership" in a skills list. List the two or three the posting explicitly names — that is keyword matching, and it is legitimate — and demonstrate the rest in bullets. "Cut turnover from 41% to 18%" says leadership better than leadership does. If a soft skill on your list has no supporting evidence anywhere on the page, either find the story or drop the skill; the same rule our example resumes apply to tools applies doubly here.
Tailoring the list to one posting
The role lists are the baseline; the posting is the tiebreaker. When you paste a job description, the generator extracts the hard and soft skills that employer actually names and merges the ones missing from your base list, highlighted so you can see exactly what came from where. Those highlighted skills deserve special scrutiny in both directions: if you have one, it goes near the top of your section, in the posting's exact wording; if you don't, that is useful information about the gap between you and this role — not an invitation to list it anyway.
For a deeper look at a single posting — repeated phrases, qualifications, and rankings by where terms appear — run it through the job description keyword extractor. And once your skills section is written, the resume keyword scanner closes the loop: it checks your finished resume against the posting and lists the keywords still missing.