How to add keywords to your CV without lying
The gap between under claiming and overclaiming is wider than most people think, and most of the honest gains sit in the middle.
Keyword stuffing is bad advice and everyone knows it. What is less discussed is how much honest ground most people leave unclaimed.
Start with what you did but never wrote down
People describe their work in the vocabulary of their own company, not the vocabulary of their industry. If your team called it the change board and the rest of the world calls it change management, you have a keyword you have earned and never used.
Read three postings you would take tomorrow. Highlight every noun you have actually done under a different name. That list is free.
Then name the tools, not just the outcomes
Plenty of CVs say built reporting dashboards and never say Power BI. The outcome is what you are proud of. The tool is what gets searched.
The line you do not cross
There is a real difference between a skill you have used and a skill adjacent to one you have used. Revit is BIM authoring, so writing BIM modelling in Revit is honest. Writing BIM coordination is not, because coordination means a federated model and clash detection in Navisworks, which is a different job.
The test is simple. If an interviewer asked you to talk about it for five minutes, would you be comfortable? If not, it belongs on your learning list, not your CV.
Say the gap out loud instead
Naming a missing skill before the employer finds it is disarming and rare. A sentence like I have built retrieval directly rather than on a managed vector store, so moving to pgvector is a swap rather than a new concept, is far stronger than either claiming it or hiding it.
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