Backend Design: What's the best way to design a database model with multiple fields that would need to be queried, given a use case like this?

So here's the thing suppose I have an object Expert that needs to be modelled to a database. This expert has parameters like (name, languages, skills, etc) If I model it as a database object and use languages, skills as a column.

Then these two things will be stored as list.

Now when I would want to query for an expert having a particular skill let's say java, I wouldn't be able to do this given the column was stored as a list.

What's the best approach in cases like this ?

Introducing another table to store skills to expert mapping seems inefficient, I was wondering if there's a smarter way.