Deciding what to put on a resume is really two decisions: which sections belong on the page, and how much of the page each one deserves. Get those two right and the writing itself becomes much easier, because every line has a defined job. This guide covers the five required sections, the optional ones that actually earn interviews, the order to arrange them by career stage, and the outdated items you can delete today without a second thought.
The five sections every resume needs
Whatever your field or level, these five sections form the skeleton. A recruiter looks for each one by name, and a parser maps your text into fields using them.
1. Header. Name, phone, professional email, city and state, and a LinkedIn or portfolio link where relevant. It is small but it fails more often than you would expect; the details, including why headers inside text boxes go missing, are in our guide to the resume header.
2. Summary (or nothing). Two to three sentences stating what you do, at what scale, with one proof point. If you cannot make it specific, omit the section entirely rather than filling the space with adjectives.
3. Work experience. The core of the document. Reverse-chronological entries, each with employer, title, location, dates, and three to six achievement bullets. This section should consume most of the page for anyone past their first job.
4. Skills. A compact list of 8 to 12 specific, relevant skills: tools, platforms, methods, languages. Choosing which ones is its own craft, covered in our guide to skills to put on a resume.
5. Education. Degree, school, and year, kept brief for experienced candidates and expanded for students. Every edge case, from unfinished degrees to GPA rules, is handled in how to list education on a resume.
Optional sections that earn interviews
An optional section belongs on your resume only if it adds evidence the required sections cannot hold. Four regularly clear that bar.
Certifications and licenses. For many roles these are the first thing verified: an RN license, a CPA, a PMP, a CDL, cloud certifications. Give them their own clearly labeled section rather than burying them under education, and include the issuing body and year.
Projects. The great equalizer for students, career changers, and anyone whose best work happened outside a job title. A project entry earns space when it has an outcome: "Built a bookings dashboard in Looker for a family restaurant; owner used it to cut Sunday overstaffing." A list of technologies with no result is a skills section wearing a costume.
Volunteer work. Counts as experience when it involved real responsibility. Treasurer of a 200-member association, coordinator of a food bank's delivery schedule: write these with the same achievement bullets as paid work. One-day events do not need a section.
Languages, publications, awards. Include when relevant to the target job or genuinely notable. "Conversational Spanish" matters for a patient-facing role in Texas; an internal "employee of the month" mention from 2016 does not.
A quick test for any optional section you are considering: imagine the recruiter asking "so what?" after reading it. If the section contains its own answer (a result, a scope, a credential they screen for), it stays. If the answer would have to come from you verbally, in an interview you have not been offered yet, the section is not ready for the page.
Section order by career stage
The rule behind every ordering decision: your strongest evidence goes highest, because the top third of the page gets the most attentive reading.
Students and new graduates. Header, summary or objective (optional), education with coursework and honors, then projects and internships, then work experience, then skills. Education leads because it is currently your strongest credential.
Mid-career professionals. Header, summary, work experience, skills, education, certifications. Experience leads and dominates; education shrinks to two lines near the bottom.
Career changers. Header, summary that names the direction, then a skills or qualifications block, then work experience, then education and any retraining certificates. The early skills block acts as a lens for reading the unfamiliar work history; this is the hybrid structure discussed in our step-by-step resume guide.
Technical and licensed professions. Whatever the stage, move certifications and licenses high, sometimes directly under the header. A nurse recruiter or a fleet manager checks the license before reading a single bullet.
Returning to work after a break. Order like a mid-career professional, but consider a one-line note in the summary or a dated entry for the break itself ("Career break for eldercare, 2023–2025") so the timeline reads as deliberate. Any substantial activity during the break, from a certification to volunteer coordination, earns a normal dated entry with bullets.
What to leave off: the relics
Each of these items used to be conventional. All of them are now either dead weight or an active problem.
- A photo. In the US, UK, and Canada, photos create bias problems that many employers deliberately avoid; some systems even strip them. (Norms differ in parts of Europe and Asia; follow the local convention.)
- Full street address. City and state is enough. Nobody mails you anything, and a precise address only invites distance-based screening.
- "References available upon request." Employers know. The line spends space on a promise, not evidence.
- An objective that restates the obvious. "Seeking a challenging position where I can grow" describes every applicant who ever lived.
- Date of birth, marital status, nationality. Irrelevant in most Western markets and puts the employer in an awkward compliance position.
- Hobbies without relevance. "Reading, travel, music" tells the reader nothing. A genuinely relevant pursuit (you are applying to a cycling company and race amateur criteriums) can stay, framed in one line.
- Skills nobody doubts. Email, Microsoft Word, "typing."
- Graduation years from decades past, optional to keep, and many people past twenty years of experience quietly drop them.
How much detail each section deserves
Think of your resume as a fixed attention budget of roughly 450 to 650 words on one page. Spend it like this:
- Work experience: 60 to 70 percent. Recent roles get three to six bullets of one to two lines each; roles past the ten-year mark compress to a line or two.
- Skills: 5 to 10 percent. One tight block. If your skills section approaches your experience section in size, the balance is off.
- Summary: 5 percent. Forty to sixty words, maximum.
- Education: 5 to 10 percent for experienced candidates; up to 25 percent for students, who should spend the surplus on coursework, projects, and honors.
- Optional sections: whatever is left, and only if they carry evidence.
A useful audit: point at any line and ask what claim it supports. A line that supports no claim is padding, whatever section it lives in.
Section headings that parse cleanly
Applicant tracking systems segment your resume by recognizing headings before they map any content. Standard headings segment reliably; inventive ones sometimes do not, and content under an unrecognized heading can land in the wrong field of the recruiter's view or in none.
Safe, boring, effective: Work experience (or Professional experience), Education, Skills, Certifications, Projects, Volunteer experience, Summary.
Riskier: "My journey," "What I bring," "Toolbox," "Where I've been." Clever headings cost machine legibility and buy nothing with human readers, who navigate by convention too.
Two mechanical notes: keep headings as real text on their own line (not inside tables or graphics), and keep your contact details out of the document's header and footer region, where some extractors do not look. If you want certainty instead of rules of thumb, run your file through a free resume checker and read back exactly what was extracted, section by section.
Frequently asked questions
What are the five main things to put on a resume?
Header with contact details, a short summary if you can make it specific, work experience with achievement bullets, a focused skills list, and education. Everything else is optional and must earn its space with evidence.
Should I put my GPA on my resume?
Include it while you are a student or recent graduate if it is strong (a common threshold is 3.5 or above), and drop it once you have a couple of years of professional experience. Details and edge cases are in our education section guide.
Do I put references on a resume?
No. Keep a separate references document ready and provide it when asked. The resume line announcing their availability is wasted space.
What goes on a resume if I have never had a job?
Education, projects, coursework, volunteering, and any informal work such as babysitting or a family business, written with the same achievement structure as paid roles. Treat them as evidence of the same skills an employer would otherwise look for in job history.
Put every section to work
Once you know which sections earn a place, the remaining work is filling them with proof. Workplacea's editor scaffolds all of these sections in a parse-clean layout and flags empty calories as you write, which makes "what goes where" the one resume question you never revisit.