What Sections to Include in a Resume (And the Right Order)
· 5 min read
Every resume needs four sections: contact information, work experience, education, and skills. Everything else — summary, projects, certifications, languages, volunteering — is optional and should appear only when it strengthens your case for a specific job. The right order depends on your career stage: students lead with education, experienced candidates lead with experience.
Which resume sections are required?
Contact information
Your name, phone number, professional email, city, and any relevant profile links (LinkedIn, portfolio, GitHub). Place it at the very top of the page body — not in the document's header region, which some applicant tracking systems skip when parsing. Your name should be the largest text on the page.
Work experience
The core of almost every resume. For each role: job title, employer, location, and dates, followed by accomplishment bullets in reverse-chronological order. This section should get the most space and the strongest writing — see our guide to writing quantified resume bullet points for the formula.
If you're a student, this section can include internships, part-time jobs, research positions, and substantial campus roles. If you have none of those yet, our guide to writing a resume with no experience shows what to use instead.
Education
Institution, degree, field of study, and graduation date (or expected date). Students can expand this with GPA, honors, relevant coursework, or thesis work. After a few years in the workforce, compress it to two lines and drop the details.
Skills
A short, concrete list of tools, technologies, languages, and certifiable competencies — the terms recruiters actually search for. Skip personality claims like "team player"; those belong in your experience bullets as demonstrated behavior. Our guide to skills to put on a resume covers what earns a spot.
What order should resume sections go in?
Order by relevance: your strongest evidence goes highest, because the top third of the page gets the most attention. That produces two standard patterns:
| Position | Student / recent graduate | Experienced professional |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Contact information | Contact information |
| 2 | Education | Summary (optional) |
| 3 | Experience (incl. internships) | Experience |
| 4 | Projects or leadership | Skills |
| 5 | Skills | Education |
Harvard's Mignone Center for Career Success reflects this convention in its resume guidance for students: education sits first while your degree is your strongest credential. The moment your work experience becomes the better argument — usually two to three years after graduating — experience moves up and education moves down.
Whatever the order, keep the layout itself simple: a single column with standard headings ("Experience," "Education," "Skills") parses reliably and scans fast. Creative headings like "My Journey" confuse both software and skimming recruiters — here's how to check your resume is ATS-friendly.
Which optional sections are worth adding?
Optional sections must pass one test: does this make me more hirable for this job than whatever it displaces? Space on a one-page resume is zero-sum.
Summary
Two to three lines compressing your strongest proof points. Worth it for experienced candidates and career changers; usually redundant for students. See our resume summary examples for patterns that work.
Projects
Add a projects section when your projects demonstrate skills your jobs don't. It's often the most important section for students, career changers, and developers — a real deployed project can outweigh an unrelated part-time job. Describe projects like jobs: name, dates, and outcome-focused bullets ("Built a budgeting app with 400+ downloads"), not feature lists.
Certifications and licenses
Include them when the role requires or explicitly values them (PMP, CPA, AWS certifications, nursing licenses, teaching credentials). List the credential name, issuer, and year. Skip trivial course-completion certificates for skills your experience already proves.
Languages
Add a languages line when the role involves international teams, customers, or markets — and always state proficiency honestly (native, fluent, conversational, basic). "Fluent Spanish" that collapses in a screening call damages your credibility across the whole document.
Volunteering and leadership
Volunteer work earns space when it demonstrates relevant skills, fills an employment gap, or shows sustained commitment. Treat it exactly like work experience: role, organization, dates, quantified bullets. "Organized a 60-volunteer fundraiser that raised $18K" is evidence of project management, whoever paid for it.
Awards, publications, and interests
Awards and publications matter in academia, research, and sales (rankings, quotas). A one-line interests section is optional social lubricant — specific beats generic ("marathon running, sourdough baking" starts conversations; "music and travel" doesn't). Cut these first when space runs short.
What should you leave off a resume?
Some traditional inclusions now actively hurt you in the US and UK:
- Photo. In American and British hiring, a headshot invites bias concerns; many recruiters are trained to set photo resumes aside. (Norms differ in parts of continental Europe and Asia — check local convention when applying abroad.)
- Date of birth, marital status, nationality. Irrelevant to your qualifications and legally awkward for employers. Oxford University's Careers Service advises UK applicants to omit personal details like date of birth, and photos, from a CV.
- "References available upon request." Employers know. The line wastes space that a real accomplishment could occupy — and Oxford's guidance treats references as unnecessary on the document itself unless an employer specifically asks.
- Full street address. City and country are enough.
- Salary history or expectations. Never on the resume; handle it in conversation if asked.
- Obsolete or assumed skills. "Microsoft Word" and "email" signal padding.
One more scoping note: if you're applying outside North America, the word "CV" sometimes means a different, longer document — our CV vs resume guide explains which one you actually need.
The bottom line
Start with the four required sections, order them by the strength of your evidence — education first as a student, experience first afterward — and add optional sections only when they beat what they displace. Then leave off the photo, the birthday, and the references line without a second thought. If you're building the whole document from scratch, our step-by-step resume writing guide walks through every section in order.
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