With the rapid speed of AI development and adoption, software engineering skills are in high demand, underpinned by data engineering.
Yet 32% of businesses cite a lack of specialist skills as a major barrier to their tech hiring, who need the software engineer talent pool to lead their digital transformation efforts.
So, what are hiring managers actually looking for in a software engineer, and what skills should you put on your CV to get noticed?
Top Skills
When reviewing CVs for a software engineer position, hiring managers are looking for the core fundamentals that demonstrate a candidate can hit the ground running.
A CV should include at least some of these skills:
- Software Development Life Cycle
- Object‑Oriented Programming
- Data Structures & Algorithms
- System Design
- Clean Code Principles
- Software Architecture
- Code Reviews
- Debugging & Troubleshooting
- Version Control
- Agile / Scrum
If these aren’t visible on your CV, either through a skills section or previous experience, then you risk being screened out of the hiring process.
Top Frameworks
Beyond core skills, hiring managers are looking for knowledge of frameworks. The most sought-after include:
- Spring / Spring Boot
- .NET / ASP.NET Core
- Node.js
- React (for full‑stack)
- RESTful APIs
Tailoring your frameworks and skills based on the job description will always improve your chances.
How to stand out to employers
Demonstrating technical skills puts you in the conversation, but you also need to show how you can apply them to deliver results.
Hiring teams like to see measurable outcomes so any projects where you can demonstrate performance improvements, reduced bug rates or faster development cycles will give you an edge.
And in the era of AI, software engineers who can work alongside AI coding tools and understand their outputs are becoming increasingly valuable. Therefore, demonstrating work with AI-assisted development can be a real differentiator.
Advice for an entry-level software engineer
It’s a difficult job market, but software engineers are in demand and there are ways to stand out when looking for that first role.
Focus on demonstrating the fundamental skills and frameworks through portfolio projects, open-source contributions or academic work. Those are the best ways to show the technical foundations that employers are looking for and demonstrate how they fit into real-world outcomes. This will significantly improve your chances of your CV standing out.
