Given that potential employers spend only seconds on the initial scan of a CV, you don’t have long to impress.

What to include and what to ditch from your work experience is sometimes easy: that unpaid two-week stint at a tenuously relevant company over a decade ago can probably go; ditto anything written in Comic Sans.

However, there are some skills that not only do not add anything of worth to your CV, but reportedly could even have a negative effect on your finances.

Salary data company payscale.com has compiled a list of 25 skills that tend to correlate with lower pay, whatever your previous experience. The research, according to Time, zoned in on skills “that workers defined as being the most critical to their job” and within those, identified the 25 with the greatest negative correlation with salary.

And the skill with the worst effect on pay? Filing.

The 25 skills to consider deleting from your CV

1. Filing
2. Property management
3. Data entry
4. Bookkeeping
5. AS/400
6. Call centre
7. Help desk/help support
8. Collections
9. Intuit QuickBooks
10. Delphi
11. Packaging
12. Computer hardware technician
13. Plumbing
14. Administration
15. Pricing
16. System repair
17. Shipping
18. Document preparation
19. Customer service
20. Dreamweaver
21. Online research
22. Paying invoices
23. Phone support
24. Wordpress
25. Typing

Many of the skills the company recommends deleting make sense because they’re ones any employer would assume of you anyway: typing, online research and the like. We all know how to google and we tend to use a keyboard to do it.

But others listed in the 2016 research seem stranger, such as plumbing, bookkeeping and customer service. One possible explanation could be that if you’re going for a job and have held positions in the past which obviously involve these skills, there’s no need to clutter your CV with the particulars.

There are also a number of specific computer programmes cited, such as Adobe Dreamweaver.

Read more: The 10 most common CV mistakes

Lydia Frank, payscale.com’s editorial director, says trends for specific software come and go, so you might sound outdated to an employer who’s moved on from the one you listed: “If that’s the pinnacle of a job applicant’s knowledge and they don’t know newer technologies, it may make [the applicant] seem weaker,” she says.

Time to edit that CV?

Image: iStock