It has been an honor to be mentioned in the recent article from BusinessTech. In their post, they identified certain skills that you should no longer include in your resume. Here, we stressed that adding fillers on your resume such as listing basic computer skills may indicate lack of better items to include. Though there might be a few recruiters that appreciate these minor details, listing skills essential to your employment is preferable.

Basic computer skills like email and Microsoft Word

At this point, listing “email” or “Microsoft Word” as skills is almost equivalent to listing “reading” or “basic math”. They’re not differentiators — they’re expected.

“By adding [these] as a skill, candidates may appear to be trying to add ‘fluff’ to their resume, i.e., that they are grasping for anything to include because they don’t have enough relevant skills to list out,” says Peter Riccio, Founding Partner of recruiting firm Atlas Search.

One exception to this would be if you’ve honed a very specific practice using these programs, such as “[creating] an access database from scratch and [importing] data from Excel and other databases,” says career coach Mary Warriner.

“Now that is worth mentioning in your skills section.”