The header of your resume should include your name and contact information: email, phone number, address, LinkedIn URL and anything else that might be important, like a link to your website, blog or portfolio. Your name should be in the largest font of your resume so that it stands out.

After the header, some people choose to add an “Objective” or “Summary” section. However, an objective section is often redundant to the rest of your resume and/or cover letter, and it takes up valuable space that you could use to fill out other sections of your resume. On the other hand, a summary can be useful if you have experience that is varied or that may not seem directly applicable to the job, since it can direct the employer’s focus to your relevant experience. If you choose to use a summary section, make sure to tweak it for each application so that it is pertinent to each specific job.

It is recommended that you use three separate statements in your summary: one summarizing professional history, one showcasing any unique academic or extracurricular accomplishments (if applicable) and one describing your behavioral skills. As with the other sections of your resume, it is best to use either a paragraph or list of bullet points leading with action verbs rather than complete sentences. See the summary from “Sarah Rodriguez” (sample three) on the resume sample document below for an effective example! You can also check out this page from Glassdoor to read more about summary sections and to see some examples of strong summaries for college students.

For current students and recent graduates, it’s helpful to list education right below your header or summary section, before experience, to emphasize that you are still learning or that you are new to the full-time job market. In this section, include the name of your college and its location (e.g., DePaul University, Chicago, IL), your major(s), any minor(s) and your anticipated graduation date. If you have space, you might also choose to include your GPA if it’s above 3.0 and any awards or honors you’ve earned. You might find this page from Indeed helpful if you want to learn more about the education section or see some examples.

For students who already have job experience in their field, a “Relevant Courses” or “Relevant Course Projects” section would be redundant to the skills already enumerated in the experience section. However, if you don’t yet have job experience in a certain field, this type of section can be useful for showcasing that you have learned relevant skills and practiced them in an academic setting. You may use a relevant courses section to list college classes you’ve taken that directly apply to your field. For example, a public relations and advertising student would list classes like Introduction to Public Relations or Mass Communication rather than Biology II. Alternatively, you could use a relevant course projects section to detail any specific class projects that could be similar to those you may encounter in the job you’re applying for. In our resume samples resource below, see sample five for an example of a relevant courses section or sample two for an example of a relevant course projects section.

For each point in your “Experience” section, you’ll always want to include your job title, company name, location and the month and year timeframe during which you were employed. Then, use bullet points to list the projects you worked on, your accomplishments and any awards or honors you received at that job. Be sure to begin each bulleted statement with a strong action verb! (See the bottom of this page for examples.) This will help highlight your successes and allow the reader to get a sense of your skills by scanning the page prior to reading each individual bullet point. It’s a good idea to vary the action verbs on your resume in order to appeal to different audiences and to emphasize your variety of skills. 

There are several options for formatting your experience section. You may choose to have one all-encompassing block titled “Experience” or “Relevant Experience.” If you are new to your field but have lots of unrelated experience from high school or college, you may choose to split your section in two: “Relevant Experience” to highlight any positions that relate to the job you’re applying for and “Additional Experience” to flesh out your employment history. If you want to highlight multiple internships you’ve held, you could similarly split your experience section into “Internship Experience” and “Additional Experience.” These types of distinctions can help guide the employer’s eye to the most relevant information and allow them to glance at the less relevant information afterward.

Finally, it’s best to organize your experience section (or each of your experience sections) in reverse chronological order, with any current jobs at the top of the section and your earliest job experience at the bottom of the section. See our resume samples resource below for examples of reverse chronological organization!

If you don’t yet have any job experience, you can build out the other sections of your resume or include casual work, volunteering or club experience. Check out these pages from Indeed and The Balance Careers for tips on writing a resume without a professional experience section.

You may have heard the terms “hard skills” and “soft skills.” Hard skills are technical skills you have gained through education or experience (such as Adobe Suite, web design or a foreign language), while “soft” skills are personal habits and traits that shape how you work by yourself and with others (such as people skills, dependability or time-management). Your skills section should showcase your specific hard skills, technical skills and foreign language skills, rather than soft skills. It is best to show your employer what concrete tasks you can perform for them rather than which subjective traits you may have. You can categorize these hard skills under a general “Skills” section, or you could split the section into something like “Skills” and “Technology” or “Technology” and “Foreign Language.”

You may have seen some trendy examples of creative resumes where people use graphics to rate their skills out of a number of points or with a bar chart. However, these ratings can be very confusing or frustrating to employers, as it’s impossible to fairly compare skills against each other when those skills differ in quality and difficulty. These ratings also don’t correspond to any specific test of skill, and you can’t fairly rate yourself on a scale you’ve constructed yourself. Instead of using a point scale or bar chart, employers will find your skills section much more intuitive if you use descriptive words like “proficient,” “functional,” “familiar” or “fluent.” See our resume guide below for examples of strong skills sections!

If you don’t have much job experience yet or if there is extra space on your resume, these types of sections can showcase your other accomplishments and make your resume more substantial. You might include college clubs or societies you’ve been a part of under something like “Activities” or under “Activities & Leadership” if you were a recognized leader in one or more of these organizations. You could also include “Publications” if your work has been published in an official medium, or you could include “Volunteer Work” if you have volunteer experience you want to highlight. However, please note that all these sections are not explicitly expected on your resume, so it’s important to fill out the required sections first and then return to these optional sections if you have the time and space to do so.