How to Write a Resume: A Section-by-Section Guide

Most people write a resume the same way: open a blank document, stare at it, type their last job title, and then stall. The stall is not a failure of memory. It is that a resume asks you to do three unrelated things at once — remember, judge and format — and doing them simultaneously is genuinely hard.

The way through is to separate them. Gather first, without editing. Write second, without formatting. Format last, without rewriting. This guide runs in that order.

Before you start: gather the raw material

Open a scratch document and spend twenty minutes putting down everything, badly. For each job you have held in the last ten to fifteen years:

• Employer, your job title, the month and year you started and finished.
• What you were responsible for, in plain language.
• Anything that changed because you were there. A number, a process, a launch, a saving, a rescue.
• Tools you used. Software, machinery, systems, methodologies.
• Anyone you trained, managed, supervised or supported.

Do not edit while you do this. The editing instinct is what makes people leave out the good parts, because at this stage everything sounds either obvious or boastful.

Section 1: contact details

Four or five lines at the top of the page, in the body of the document rather than in a Word header, which many applicant tracking systems ignore.

• Your name, larger than everything else.
• The job title you are applying for, or a one-line role descriptor. Optional, but it orients the reader instantly.
• Phone number and email address, written as plain text.
• City and country. A full street address is no longer expected and is a small privacy risk.
• One link if it earns its place: LinkedIn, a portfolio, a repository.

Use an email address that is your name. Nobody has ever been hired despite an address from 2009, but plenty of people have quietly been marked down for one.

Section 2: work experience

Write this before the summary. Newest role first, then backwards. Each entry has the same four parts, formatted identically:

Job Title — Employer — City — Mar 2021 to Present

Then three to six bullet points beneath it. More for your current and previous role, fewer as you go back. A job from twelve years ago may need only a single line, or only its title and dates.

What a bullet point should contain

A good bullet has an action, an object and a result. The result is the part almost everyone omits, and it is the part that does the work.

You do not need a number in every bullet. Where you have no number, say what changed instead: a process that stopped failing, a backlog that cleared, a customer that stayed. Writing resume bullet points takes this apart in more detail, including what to do when your work genuinely has no measurable output.

Gaps, short stints and jobs you would rather skip

Leave the gaps visible and account for them in one line: Career break — caring responsibilities — 2022 to 2023. An unexplained gap invites a worse guess than the truth. A short stint you are embarrassed by is still better listed than left as a hole. What you are not obliged to do is explain why you left anywhere; that is an interview conversation.

Section 3: the summary

Three or four lines under your contact details. Now that the experience section exists, this is much easier: it is a compression of what you just wrote, pointed at the job you want.

A workable shape is: what you are, how long, the two or three things you are strongest at, and the one result you would want remembered.

Registered nurse with eight years on acute medical wards, including three as a shift lead. Experienced in complex discharge planning, mentoring newly qualified staff, and the electronic records rollout that cut medication documentation errors on my ward by a third.

Write it in the third person without pronouns, as above. Avoid the adjective pile-up — dynamic, passionate, results-driven professional — which says nothing and appears on a million other files. Writing a resume summary has more shapes and examples, including for people changing field.

Section 4: education

Qualification, institution, year. Reverse order, most recent first.

If you graduated more than about five years ago, this section is short and sits below your experience. If you graduated recently or are still studying, it goes above your experience and can carry more: relevant modules, a dissertation title, a placement, an award. See writing a resume with no experience if this is most of what you have.

Include grades only if they are strong or if your field expects them. Leave secondary school off once you have a degree, unless the advert asks.

Section 5: skills

A short list, grouped if it helps. Tools, systems, languages, certifications, licences.

Two rules. First, no rating bars or star ratings: they are meaningless to the reader and they parse badly. Second, do not list a skill here that has no supporting evidence anywhere else on the page. If project management appears in your skills and in none of your bullets, it reads as an aspiration.

Certifications and licences that are hard requirements for your field deserve their own line, in full: NMC Registration (PIN 12A3456B), Full UK driving licence, CIPD Level 5, SIA Door Supervisor licence.

Optional sections, and when they earn space

• Publications, patents, conference talks — in academia, research and some technical fields, essential. Elsewhere, only if directly relevant.
• Volunteering — worth including when it shows skills your paid work does not, or fills a gap.
• Languages — with an honest level. “Conversational” and “fluent” are very different promises.
• Interests — usually the first thing to cut. Keep one line only if it is genuinely unusual or genuinely relevant.
• References — leave them off. “Available on request” is assumed and wastes a line.

Formatting, once the words are done

Keep it to one column with no tables, no text boxes and no images carrying text, which is what lets applicant tracking software read it correctly. Standard headings. Consistent dates. Body text at 10 to 12 point in a common typeface. Ragged-right alignment. Margins no tighter than half an inch.

The full list is in the eight formatting rules, and choosing a font covers the typography.

The last pass: tailoring

A resume written for nobody in particular performs like one. Before each application, spend fifteen minutes on three things:

1. The summary line. Point it at this role, using this employer’s job title.
2. Two or three bullets. Promote the ones closest to the advert; demote or cut the ones that are not.
3. The skills list. Make sure every named tool and qualification in the advert that you genuinely have appears somewhere on your page, spelled the way the employer spelled it.

Tailoring a resume to a job description sets out the whole routine, and the free keyword checker will tell you what you have missed.

Proofreading, properly

Read it aloud. You will hear the sentences that do not work and catch the words spellcheck approved but you did not mean. Then read it backwards, bullet by bullet, which breaks the sense and surfaces typos. Then give it to somebody else, because you cannot see your own file after the fourth hour.

Check the dates add up. Check the job titles match what your referees will say. Check the phone number by dialling it.

If you would rather not start from a blank page

Most of the difficulty in writing a resume is not the layout — it is knowing what a good bullet point for your job sounds like. That is why the templates here are written per job title rather than sold as one generic design: the project manager file contains project manager bullets, the medical assistant file contains medical assistant bullets, and each is drafted at four experience levels so you can start from the one nearest your own.

There are 498 job titles, organised by industry, field and career level. How it works explains the process end to end.

Common questions

In what order should the sections go?

Contact details, summary, work experience, education, skills. The one common exception is a recent graduate or career changer, who puts education above experience while it is the stronger card.

Should I include an objective statement?

Rarely. An objective says what you want; a summary says what you bring. Employers read the second. The exception is a genuine career change, where one line of context helps. Summary versus objective covers the difference.

How far back should my work history go?

Ten to fifteen years in detail. Older roles can be listed as a short block of titles, employers and dates with no bullets, or left off if they are irrelevant.

Do I need a different resume for every application?

Not a different resume — a tailored one. Keep one strong base document per type of role and adjust the summary, a few bullets and the skills list each time.

Should I use a resume builder or a template?

Either, as long as the output is a single-column document you own and can edit offline. Be wary of builders that lock your file behind a subscription or export designs built entirely from text boxes.

One more thing

A resume is not a biography. It is an argument that you should be interviewed for one particular job, made in about six hundred words. Every line that does not help make that argument is taking space from one that would.

• Filed under
• Bullet points
• Getting started
• Resume writing