What Is A resume?
A resume is a tool to quickly summarize your strengths and accomplishments to potential employers. A strong resume is clear, organized, and concise. Hiring managers often spend less than a minute glancing at resumes on their first review, which means you want to highlight what they are looking for in a clear way. To help with this, we suggest tailoring your resume for each job and keeping it to 1-2 pages in length. One page is appropriate if you are a beginning career professional and two pages is appropriate if you are a mid career professional (10+ years of work experience).
The goal of the resume is to get an interview. You don’t have to explain everything about every experience you’ve ever had. You’ll have the chance to explain more about your experiences if you are offered an interview. For now, focus on creating a document that is well-structured and succinct, that demonstrates your skills and accomplishments.
Main Parts of a Resume
- Header
- Qualifications/Profile/Summary Section
- Education
- Experience
Optional Additional Sections:
- Leadership & Involvement
- Certifications
- Awards
- Volunteering
- Projects
- Research Experience
- Skills
Your resume should include the main parts listed above. Depending on the job posting and the amount of room available in your document, consider including content from the optional additional sections. Because the length of the resume is one page, it is likely that you will need to be selective about what to include. Consider having a master resume document that hosts all of your experiences, skills, certifications, volunteering, etc. Then you can pick and choose which sections to include for each tailored resume.
We recommend that you tailor each resume to every opening you apply for, which means customizing the resume with skills, keywords, and accomplishments that are relevant for that particular job description.
What to Include in Each Section
Want a visual alongside these written instructions? Click on our resume guide to see what a sample resume looks like.
Top Header:
- Your name should be the largest element on the page and stand out.
- Phone number
- Personal email
- Optional: You can list your pronouns in this section underneath or next to your name
- Add your LinkedIn profile URL here if your profile is complete. Need help filling out your profile? Check out our LinkedIn Page.
Qualifications: (This section is optional, but highly recommended)
- Showcase your top qualifications/skills through 3-5 bullets.
- Tailor this section to each job description, utilizing keywords to show how you have what the posting is looking for.
Education:
- List your degree and major
- List your university and the location of the university (city, state)
- List your graduation date or expected graduation date
- GPA is optional to include, but recommended if above 3.0
- If you have them list concentrations and minors
- If relevant, you can list study abroad experiences here
- This is a space where you can include relevant coursework or projects. You can also create a separate section to highlight projects
Experience:
- List items in reverse chronological order, (most recent experiences first)
- Use bulleted statements to showcase your skills and achievements. Look at the Creating Strong Bullet Points Section below for how to do this.
Creating Strong Bullet Points:
Bullet Point Guidelines:
- No personal pronouns
- Use consistent tense
- Start the bullet point with a strong action verb.
- Provide metrics and numeric results when available
- Use industry specific terms
- Use the job description to craft compelling statements about your experience and skills that align with what the job is looking for
Bullet Point Formula:
Action Verb + Skills used + Result/Value Added
Examples:
- Mastered various coffee brewing techniques, including expresso, pour-over, and cold brew, ensuring consistently high-quality beverages.
- Processed financial transactions at highest profiting store in the area, handling over $500 a day and counting, managing, and distributing tips to colleagues.
Highlight Transferable Skills in your Bullet Points:
Transferable skills are abilities and competencies that can be applied across different roles and industries. These skills are not limited to specific job functions, making them valuable assets that can be transferred and utilized in various contexts.
We recommend highlighting transferable skills on your resume! For example, skills like communication, problem solving, leadership, adaptability, teamwork, and time management are all transferable and can be relevant in multiple scenarios.
For example, let’s say the work experience you want to include is from a barista role. If you are applying to another barista job, you can highlight skills that are very specific to being a barista. If you are applying to a non-barista job, you’d want to highlight the transferable skills you used on the job to demonstrate how you have applicable experience.
Examples:
Applying to another barista job
- Mastered various coffee brewing techniques, including expresso, pour-over, and cold brew, ensuring consistently high-quality beverages. (Job specific skills)
Applying to a non-barista job
- Fostered a collaborative work environment by effectively communicating and coordinating with team members.
- Proactive problem solver, adept at resolving customer dissatisfaction and addressing any issues during shifts.
Need more examples? Check out this list of transferable skills.
Formatting Tips:
- 1 – 2 pages full pages max, no 1.5 pages
- Margins no less than .5” all around
- Use bold, italics, and spaces to distinguish different sections
- Suggested fonts include: Calibri, Arial, Georgia, Times New Roman
- Content font size 10 – 13, Header can be size 14 – 16
Major/Industry Specific Resume Samples
Supply Chain Management Resume Sample
Master of Engineering Resume Sample
Early Childhood Teaching Resume Sample
Wildlife Conservation Resume Guide
More resume samples and resources curated for your industry/major can be found on your college’s career web page.
Navigating Bias in Applications
How to Decide What to Highlight on your Resume:
At the Career Center we believe students’ identities and life experiences contribute to valuable strengths that are worth celebrating and showcasing on application materials. We also acknowledge that not all recruiters and organizations value every type of experience and identity, which can lead to bias and discrimination in the application process.
One approach to navigating bias is being clear and authentic about your identities on a resume and see which employers recognize these as strengths. One great outcome of taking this approach is that you might find a great values fit with an employer who sees you as your full self, and is excited about what your various identities bring to the table.
Another approach is being more general about your identities and experiences on a resume to protect from potential bias. Some items you might choose to be more general about or not mention would be political experience, religious groups, controversial research, disclosing of a disability, and listing pronouns. For example, instead of listing a specific faith, you could mention you volunteered at a spiritual organization. Instead of naming a specific political student organization, you could list it as a student leadership organization.
A resume is a snapshot of who you are and we encourage you to share however much of yourself feels good to you. There are many ways to approach this. If you’d like someone to discuss this with, we highly recommend a Career Center Drop-in or appointment.
Using AI as a Tool
We recommend using AI as a way to enhance and sharpen your existing writing, and not to replace your authentic voice. We don’t recommend having AI write your resume from scratch partially for the generic tone it can create and also because it might add things that aren’t true and/or fill in with experience you don’t have.
One way we recommend using Chat GPT is like a content editor. For example you can enter one of your bullet points and ask if it needs improvement. You can also use AI to help make sure you are incorporating keywords that tailor your resume to the job description.
Sample AI prompts to Enhance an Existing Resume
- Review my resume and provide three ways to re-write these bullet points for this job description to emphasize results and outcomes. {Copy + paste your resume and job description.}
- Using my current resume, how should I re-write it if I’m applying to [JOB TITLE] at [COMPANY]? {Copy + paste your resume and the job description.}
- Using this job description, give me a list of 5 skills and 5 keywords I should highlight on my resume. {Copy + paste the job description.}