# How to Write a Resume: Every Section, With an Example

Write a resume by leading with your contact details, then a short summary, quantified work experience, your skills, and your education, in that order.

---

- **Canonical URL:** https://dothecalculation.com/blog/career/how-to-write-a-resume
- **Category:** Career
- **Author:** Do The Calculation Team
- **Published:** 2026-09-26
- **Reading time:** 26 min read
- **Publisher:** Do The Calculation (https://dothecalculation.com)
- **Methodology:** https://dothecalculation.com/methodology

---

## How do you write a resume?

Write a resume by putting your name and contact details at the top, then a short summary of who you are professionally, then your work experience as bullet points that name a result, then your skills, then your education. Lead with whichever of experience or education is stronger for the role, use one page if you can, and keep every line specific enough that someone who never met you can tell what you actually did.

Below, each section is covered in the order you fill it in, then one complete resume is built from nothing, section by section, followed by a before-and-after table of weak versus strong bullets, what to include at each career stage, how to write a resume with no work experience yet, and the length, format and content rules that career centres and equal-opportunity regulators actually publish.

Tool: [Open the free resume builder](https://dothecalculation.com/tools/resume-builder) — Fill in each section as you read. It runs in your browser, needs no sign-up, offers four templates, checks your content as you type, and downloads a finished resume as a PDF or Word file.

## Resume sections, in the order you fill them in

A resume has five sections that almost every guide agrees on: contact information, a summary, work experience, skills, and education. Everything else, such as certifications, projects or volunteering, is optional and depends on your field and career stage. Filling the sections in the order below means each one builds on facts you already have in front of you, rather than sending you back to add something you forgot.

_[Figure: The order to build a resume — Each step uses information you already wrote down in the step before it.]_

### 1. Contact information

Start with your full name, phone number and email address, then your city and state or region (a full street address is not needed and, in most of the US, UK, Canada and Australia, is one of the details worth leaving off). Add a link to a portfolio, GitHub, or LinkedIn-style profile if it is relevant and current. The UK National Careers Service lists a CV as needing "a section for your contact details," followed by an introduction, education history, work history and references, and recommends including a work-related network profile link where you have one (nationalcareers.service.gov.uk).

Leave off your date of birth, marital status and a photograph unless the job or the country you are applying in specifically expects one; the regional differences are covered later in this guide and in [resume vs CV and regional conventions](/tools/resume-builder#resume-vs-cv-and-regional-conventions) on the resume builder page.

### 2. Resume summary, and objective versus summary

A resume summary is three or four sentences near the top that say, in plain language, what kind of professional you are, how much experience you have, and one or two things you are good at that this employer needs. It is written last, after the rest of the resume is drafted, because by then you actually know what your strongest points are. A summary works for anyone with some relevant experience, including a first job if you can point to internships, coursework or a clear direction.

An objective is a single sentence saying what you want, such as "Seeking an entry-level role in supply chain analytics." It says what you want rather than what you offer, and most current guidance treats it as optional at best. Use an objective only when you are changing fields entirely and need to explain, in one line, why an unrelated work history still fits the job; otherwise a summary does more work for the same space.

**Summary versus objective, side by side**
|  | Resume summary | Resume objective |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Focuses on | What you offer the employer | What you want from the employer |
| Length | 2-4 sentences or bullet fragments | 1 sentence |
| Best for | Anyone with relevant experience, including internships | Career changers, or a resume with almost no relevant history |
| Example | "Operations coordinator with 7 years managing warehouse scheduling and vendor logistics for a multi-site retailer, known for cutting late shipments and training new staff fast." | "Seeking to move from retail management into logistics coordination." |

### 3. Work experience and how to write a bullet point

List jobs in reverse chronological order, most recent first, each with a job title, employer, location, and start and end dates (month and year is enough). Under each job, write 3 to 6 bullet points, not paragraphs. Harvard's career services guidance for a strong resume tells students to be "fact-based (quantify and qualify)" and to demonstrate results rather than list duties, and to keep formatting consistent throughout, including spacing, bold, italics and capitalization (careerservices.fas.harvard.edu). A duty tells the reader what your job was; a result tells them what you actually changed.

A dependable structure for a bullet is: action verb, then the scope of what you did, then the measurable result. "Managed inventory" is a duty. "Reorganized the warehouse's pick-path layout across 4,000 SKUs, cutting average order-fulfillment time from 38 to 22 minutes" is a bullet with a verb, a scope, and a number. Not every bullet will have a dollar figure or a percentage, but most jobs generate more countable facts than people first assume: how many people, how much budget, how often, how much faster, how many fewer errors.

**The bullet-point structure**

```
Action verb + what you did and its scope + measurable result
```
- The verb starts the sentence: "Reduced," "Trained," "Negotiated," "Rebuilt," not "Responsible for."
- The scope answers "how much": how many people, sites, accounts, dollars, or SKUs.
- The result answers "so what": a number, a percentage, a time saved, or a concrete outcome.

Use a fresh action verb for each bullet rather than repeating the same one down the page; the University of Illinois career center advises using "a variety of action verbs to bring your skills and experiences to life" and avoiding using the same verb or adjective more than once on a resume (careercenter.illinois.edu). Useful verbs by category: leadership (led, coordinated, supervised, mentored); improvement (reduced, streamlined, resolved, corrected); creation (built, designed, launched, implemented); and analysis (audited, forecasted, reconciled, evaluated).

### How to quantify a bullet that has no obvious number

- Frequency: how many times a week, month or shift did you do this? "Processed 60-80 customer returns per shift" is more concrete than "handled returns."
- Scale: how many people, accounts, locations or units were affected? "Trained 14 new hires across 3 store locations" beats "trained new staff."
- Time: how much faster, or how much time did it save? "Cut monthly close from 6 days to 4" is a bullet a hiring manager remembers.
- Money: revenue generated, costs cut, budget managed. Even an approximate range, stated honestly, is stronger than no figure at all.
- Before-and-after: what was broken, and what did it look like once you fixed it? "Reduced shipment errors from roughly 1 in 20 orders to fewer than 1 in 100" tells a complete story in one line.

### 4. Skills

List skills that are specific and match the language used in the job description you are applying to, not a wall of generic adjectives. Split hard, tool-based skills (software, systems, languages, certifications) from soft skills (communication, leadership) if you have both, because a hiring manager and an applicant tracking system both scan the hard-skills list first. Six to twelve items is usually enough; a skills section that runs to thirty items reads as padding rather than proof.

Match your wording to the posting where you honestly can: if the job description says "inventory management systems" and you have used one, use that exact phrase rather than a close synonym. This is also where the guide on how those screening systems work is relevant: the ATS guide covers what those systems do and how they read your skills section, and links to [the ATS guide](/blog/career/ats-friendly-resume) if you want the fuller mechanics.

### 5. Education, and where it belongs

List your highest or most relevant credential first: school or institution name, credential, field of study, and graduation year (or expected year). Add your GPA only if it is strong and recent, and add relevant coursework only if you have little else to show yet. Where this section sits on the page depends entirely on career stage, which the table further down in this guide sets out in full: a student or recent graduate puts education above work experience, and an experienced professional puts it below. The UK National Careers Service describes exactly this split, recommending contact details, introduction, education, then work history for someone earlier in their career, and contact details, introduction, work history, then education for someone more experienced (nationalcareers.service.gov.uk).

### 6. Optional sections

Certifications, licenses, volunteer work, languages, publications and personal projects are all optional, and each earns its place only if it tells the reader something the rest of the resume does not. A current forklift certification matters for a logistics role. A decade-old lifeguard certificate does not. Volunteering that involved real responsibility, such as treasurer of a club or coordinator of an event, is worth a line, especially if you are filling out a thinner work-experience section.

### 7. Format, and 8. save and export

Pick one font and one layout and use it consistently for every heading, date and bullet. The UK National Careers Service recommends "a clear font like Arial, Times New Roman or Calibri in size 11 or bigger" (nationalcareers.service.gov.uk), and the University of Illinois career center advises against "fancy fonts, flashy or unusual layouts, and images or graphics" (careercenter.illinois.edu). Harvard's guidance adds a practical check most people skip: confirm the formatting still looks right once the file is converted to a PDF, because a layout built in one program can shift fonts, spacing or bullet styles when it is opened somewhere else (careerservices.fas.harvard.edu).

Save the finished resume as a PDF, name the file with your name and, if you are sending several versions, the role: "Maria-Chen-Resume-Logistics-Coordinator.pdf" rather than "resume final v3.pdf". If you built it in the [free resume builder](/tools/resume-builder), the content checks flag missing sections and vague bullets before you download, and the same data exports to a PDF or a Word file so you can make small edits later without starting over.

## A complete resume, built section by section

Here is one full resume, worked from nothing, for a fictional mid-career candidate: Maria Chen, an operations and logistics coordinator with seven years of experience, applying for a Senior Logistics Coordinator role at a larger distribution company. Every number below is invented for the example, but the structure, and the way each bullet is built, works the same way for a nurse, an accountant, a teacher or any other mid-career role.

**Contact information and summary**
| Section | Content |
| --- | --- |
| Name | Maria Chen |
| Contact | Portland, OR · (503) 555-0148 · maria.chen@email.com · linkedin.com/in/mariachenlogistics |
| Summary | Operations and logistics coordinator with 7 years managing warehouse scheduling, vendor relationships and last-mile delivery for a multi-site retailer. Cut late shipments by a third in the last two years and trained 20+ new staff across 3 locations. Looking to bring that record to a larger distribution network. |

**Work experience: most recent role**
| Field | Content |
| --- | --- |
| Title | Logistics Coordinator |
| Employer | Riverbend Home & Garden Co., Portland, OR |
| Dates | March 2021 - Present |
| Bullet 1 | Redesigned the warehouse pick-path layout across 4,000 SKUs, cutting average order-fulfillment time from 38 to 22 minutes. |
| Bullet 2 | Renegotiated contracts with 3 regional freight carriers, reducing quarterly shipping costs by 18% without changing delivery windows. |
| Bullet 3 | Reduced late shipments from 1 in 8 orders to 1 in 20 by building a daily carrier-performance dashboard and escalation process. |
| Bullet 4 | Trained and onboarded 14 new warehouse staff across 3 store locations, cutting new-hire ramp-up time from 6 weeks to 4. |

**Work experience: earlier role**
| Field | Content |
| --- | --- |
| Title | Warehouse Associate, then Shift Supervisor |
| Employer | Cascade Distribution Center, Beaverton, OR |
| Dates | June 2018 - February 2021 |
| Bullet 1 | Promoted to Shift Supervisor within 18 months after consistently exceeding daily pick-and-pack targets by 15%. |
| Bullet 2 | Supervised a team of 9 associates across a 100,000-square-foot facility, coordinating shift schedules and daily workload. |
| Bullet 3 | Cut inventory discrepancies by 40% by introducing a weekly cycle-count process and correcting root causes with the receiving team. |

**Skills, education and certifications**
| Section | Content |
| --- | --- |
| Skills | Warehouse management systems (SAP EWM), freight and carrier negotiation, inventory forecasting, cycle counting, staff scheduling, cross-functional coordination, Microsoft Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP) |
| Education | A.A.S., Supply Chain Management, Portland Community College, 2018 |
| Certifications | Certified in warehouse safety (OSHA 10-Hour), forklift-certified (current) |

> **Why the summary was written last** — The line "Cut late shipments by a third in the last two years" in Maria's summary is a direct restatement of the bullet showing late shipments dropping from 1 in 8 to 1 in 20 orders. Writing the experience bullets first, with their numbers, gave the summary something concrete to point back to instead of a vague claim about being "detail-oriented and results-driven."

If Maria were negotiating an offer against this resume, the [salary calculator](/calculators/salary-calculator) and the [hourly-to-salary calculator](/calculators/hourly-to-salary-calculator) convert a quoted rate into the same terms as her current pay so she can compare offers directly, and the [take-home paycheck calculator](/calculators/take-home-paycheck-calculator) turns a gross offer into what actually lands in her account after tax and deductions.

## Before and after: turning duties into bullets

The single biggest gap between a resume that gets read and one that gets skipped is whether each line describes a duty or a result. The table below rewrites ten common, generic lines into bullets that follow the verb-scope-result structure, across a spread of roles.

**Weak bullet versus strong bullet, by role**
| Role | Weak (duty only) | Strong (verb + scope + result) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Retail sales associate | Responsible for helping customers and running the register. | Processed 100+ transactions per shift and upsold add-on products, contributing to a 12% rise in average sale value over 6 months. |
| Elementary school teacher | Taught a class of students and graded assignments. | Designed and delivered a reading program for 26 third-graders, raising average reading-level scores by 1.2 grade levels in one school year. |
| Software developer | Worked on the company website and fixed bugs. | Rebuilt the checkout page's load path, cutting average page-load time from 4.1 to 1.6 seconds and reducing cart abandonment by 9%. |
| Registered nurse | Cared for patients on the medical-surgical floor. | Managed a 5-to-1 patient caseload on a 32-bed medical-surgical unit, maintaining a zero-incident medication-error record over 18 months. |
| Staff accountant | Handled month-end close and reconciliations. | Closed the books 2 days faster each month by automating 3 recurring reconciliations in Excel, saving roughly 15 hours of manual work monthly. |
| Marketing coordinator | Managed social media accounts for the company. | Grew Instagram engagement 34% over 9 months by shifting the posting schedule to peak-traffic windows identified from platform analytics. |
| Warehouse supervisor | Oversaw daily warehouse operations. | Supervised a 12-person shift across a 60,000-square-foot facility, hitting same-day shipping targets on 98% of orders. |
| Customer service representative | Answered customer calls and resolved issues. | Resolved an average of 45 support tickets per day with a 95% first-contact resolution rate, above the team average of 82%. |
| Administrative assistant | Organized meetings and managed office supplies. | Coordinated scheduling for a 6-person executive team across 3 time zones, cutting meeting-rebooking rate from 20% to under 5%. |
| Restaurant shift lead | Ran the kitchen during evening shifts. | Led a 5-person kitchen team through an average of 180 covers per evening shift while holding food-cost variance under 2%. |

> **When you genuinely have no number** — Some duties really do not have a clean metric, especially in caregiving, creative or early-career roles. When that happens, describe the scope precisely instead of inventing a number: "sole point of contact for 3 vendor accounts" or "first responder on all overnight safety incidents for a 40-bed facility" still reads as specific, even with no percentage attached.

## What to include, by career stage

The five core sections stay the same at every stage; what changes is which section leads, how much space experience gets, and what fills the gaps when work history is thin. The table below sets out what a resume should emphasize at each stage.

**Resume emphasis by career stage**
| Stage | Section order | What fills the space | Length |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Student, no internship yet | Contact, objective or short summary, education, projects/coursework, skills, activities | Relevant coursework, class projects, part-time jobs (even unrelated ones, for reliability and soft skills), volunteering | One page |
| Early career (0-3 years) | Contact, summary, education (still fairly high), work experience, skills | The internship or first job or two, with results wherever possible, plus any certifications earned since graduating | One page |
| Mid-career (4-10 years) | Contact, summary, work experience (this is now the largest section), skills, education | Two to four most relevant roles in depth; older or unrelated roles trimmed to a line or dropped | One page, sometimes a light two |
| Senior (10+ years) | Contact, summary, work experience, skills, education | Scope and leadership: budgets managed, teams led, strategic results, not a full list of every job since graduation | Two pages is common and accepted |
| Career change | Contact, summary or brief objective, skills (moved up to highlight transferable ones), work experience, education | Transferable achievements framed in the new field's language, plus any bridging coursework, certifications or freelance/volunteer work in the new field | One page |

The career-change row is worth a second look, because it is the one case where moving skills above work experience, or leading with a short, honest objective, genuinely helps: it gives the reader the frame ("this person is applying their project-management background to a new industry") before they hit a job history that, read literally, looks unrelated.

## Writing a resume with no experience

A resume with no formal work experience is not a resume with nothing to say; it is a resume that leads with different evidence. Students, recent school leavers, and people returning to work after a gap all have the same problem to solve: proving reliability, relevant skill and the ability to learn quickly, without a job history to lean on.

### Students and recent graduates

Put education first, above work experience, exactly as the career-stage table above sets out. List relevant coursework, class projects with a concrete outcome ("Built a budgeting spreadsheet model for a 12-student capstone project, presented to a panel of 3 local business owners"), and any part-time or seasonal work, even if it looks unrelated to the target job. A retail or food-service job still demonstrates punctuality, handling money accurately, and working with the public, all of which are legitimate bullets when framed as skills rather than apologized for as "just a summer job."

### School leavers without a degree

Lead with whatever combination of school, apprenticeship, vocational training or short courses you have completed, then move quickly to any paid or volunteer work, sports team leadership, or organizing role, all of which show responsibility and follow-through. A specific, well-described part-time job beats a vague, padded "objective" every time; the hiring manager is trying to answer "can this person show up and do the work," and concrete detail answers that question better than enthusiasm alone.

### People returning to work after a gap

If you have been out of paid work for caregiving, health, or another personal reason, you do not need to explain the gap on the resume itself; a cover letter or interview is the better place for that if it comes up at all. What belongs on the resume is what you did during that time that is relevant: managing a household budget, volunteering, freelance work, coursework, or running a community group all translate into real bullets. A combination format, which leads with a skills summary before the reverse-chronological work history, often suits a returning candidate better than a strict chronological layout, because it lets the strongest, most recent skills lead rather than a date gap.

## How long should a resume be? One page or two?

One page is the safer default for most students, early-career candidates and mid-career professionals. The University of Illinois career center puts it plainly: "One-page, conventional resumes are typically most appropriate," while noting that length still depends on degree level, field and how much genuinely relevant experience you have (careercenter.illinois.edu). Yale's Office of Career Strategy takes a similar but less rigid position, saying that "for some careers, a longer resume may be appropriate" and recommending you discuss the right length with a career advisor for your specific field rather than follow one fixed rule (ocs.yale.edu).

In practice, two pages becomes reasonable once you have roughly a decade or more of relevant experience, several distinct roles worth describing in depth, or you work in a field, such as academia, medicine, law or senior technical leadership, where a longer document is the norm. The test either way is the same: does every line earn its place, or is it there because you are trying to fill space? A one-page resume of tight, quantified bullets beats a two-page resume padded with duties every time.

## Resume formats: chronological, functional, and combination

There are three common resume formats, and they differ in how they organize work experience relative to skills.

**The three resume formats compared**
| Format | How it is organized | Best for | Watch out for |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Chronological | Work experience listed in reverse date order, most recent first, as the main section | Most candidates with a steady, relevant work history | Can expose short stints or gaps if not handled carefully |
| Functional (skills-based) | Skills and achievements grouped by theme at the top; dates and employers pushed down or minimized | Rarely the best choice; occasionally used for a very early career change with almost no relevant history | Widely viewed with suspicion by hiring managers and recruiters |
| Combination (hybrid) | A skills summary or key-achievements block up top, followed by a full reverse-chronological work history | Career changers, people with a gap, or anyone who wants to lead with strengths without hiding their history | Needs discipline to avoid duplicating the same points twice |

Chronological is the default for good reason: it is what most hiring managers expect, and it is the easiest format for an applicant tracking system to parse correctly into job titles, employers and dates. A functional resume, by contrast, deliberately separates skills from the jobs and dates where you used them, and recruiters and hiring managers generally read that separation as an attempt to hide something, whether that is a gap, a string of short stints, or a career that has not gone in one clear direction. Because of that reputation, most career-advice sources recommend against a pure functional format for almost everyone, and suggest a combination format instead whenever you genuinely need to lead with skills rather than a job title.

A combination resume gets you most of what a functional resume promises (leading with your strongest, most relevant points) without the credibility cost, because the full, dated work history is still there for anyone who wants to check it. That is why the career-change row of the stage table above recommends combination over pure functional.

## What not to include on a resume

A short list of things do not belong on most resumes, for reasons that range from wasted space to real legal risk for the employer who receives them.

- Age, date of birth or graduation years that reveal your age unnecessarily. The US EEOC lists age (40 and over) among the characteristics an employer cannot base a hiring decision on, and specifically flags any pre-employment inquiry that would reveal age as something employers should avoid (eeoc.gov). In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 guidance says an employer can only ask for a date of birth on an application form if a specific age is a genuine requirement of the job, such as selling alcohol, and separately warns against age-coded phrases like "recent graduate" unless the age link is genuine (gov.uk).
- Marital status, number of children, or family plans. The EEOC lists inquiries about marital or family status among prohibited pre-employment questions, and the UK National Careers Service explicitly excludes marital status from what belongs on a CV (eeoc.gov; nationalcareers.service.gov.uk).
- A photograph, in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. The EEOC states plainly that "employers should not ask for a photograph of an applicant" (eeoc.gov). This differs by region; the short regional note below points to where a photo is more common and how to handle it.
- A full street address. City and state or region is enough; a full address adds a small privacy risk for no practical benefit.
- A "References available on request" line, in most of the US context, since it is assumed and takes up a line better spent on a bullet. Where you are in a country whose CV convention includes a references section, such as some UK templates, follow that local convention instead.
- Personal pronouns and narrative style. Harvard's guidance is direct on this: "don't use personal pronouns (such as I or We)," skip narrative sentences, slang and abbreviations, and do not include pictures, age or gender (careerservices.fas.harvard.edu).
- Salary history or expectations, unless a specific application explicitly asks for it.
- Irrelevant hobbies with no connection to the role or the workplace culture you are applying into. A hobby that demonstrates a real, relevant skill (competitive chess for an analytical role, marathon training for a role that values discipline) can stay; a generic list of "reading, movies, spending time with family" adds nothing.

A short regional note: whether to include a photograph, and what a "CV" is called and expected to contain, both vary by country. The US, UK, Canada and Australia expect no photo and use "resume" and "CV" close to interchangeably (with the UK favoring "CV" for almost everything). Parts of continental Europe, the Middle East and East Asia commonly do include a small, professional photo. For the fuller breakdown, see [resume vs CV and regional conventions](/tools/resume-builder#resume-vs-cv-and-regional-conventions) on the resume builder page, and keep any photo you do include small, current and plainly professional.

## Font, size and layout

Keep the format plain and consistent rather than decorative. The UK National Careers Service recommends "a clear font like Arial, Times New Roman or Calibri in size 11 or bigger" (nationalcareers.service.gov.uk), and the University of Illinois career center advises against "fancy fonts, flashy or unusual layouts, and images or graphics," recommending simple, professional formatting instead (careercenter.illinois.edu). A body size of 10 to 12 points, with your name and section headings a few points larger, reads comfortably on screen and in print and is unlikely to trip up an applicant tracking system.

Whatever layout you choose, apply it identically to every section: the same date format, the same bullet style, the same spacing before and after each heading. Harvard's guidance calls this out specifically, asking candidates to "be consistent in format and content" and to check that the layout "will translate properly if converted to a .pdf," since a document built in one word processor can shift its spacing or fonts once it is opened somewhere else (careerservices.fas.harvard.edu). A single inconsistency, such as one job using "2021-2023" and another using "March 2021 to June 2023," is a small thing that a careful reader notices.

Tool: [Build your resume section by section](https://dothecalculation.com/tools/resume-builder) — Work through contact details, summary, experience, skills and education in a browser tool with no account needed. It checks your bullets against common weak phrasing, offers four templates, matches your skills section to a pasted job description, and exports a finished PDF or Word file.

## Sources

- Harvard FAS, Mignone Center for Career Success, "Create a Strong Resume": bullet structure, quantifying results, formatting consistency, and what to leave off: https://careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/resources/create-a-strong-resume/
- UK National Careers Service, CV sections, including required sections, order by career stage, font recommendations and what to exclude: https://nationalcareers.service.gov.uk/careers-advice/cv-sections
- US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Prohibited Employment Policies/Practices, on protected characteristics and prohibited pre-employment inquiries including photographs, age and marital status: https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices
- GOV.UK, Preventing discrimination in recruitment, on the Equality Act 2010, date-of-birth questions on application forms, and age-coded language: https://www.gov.uk/employer-preventing-discrimination/recruitment
- Yale Office of Career Strategy, Resumes channel, on ATS-formatted templates, resume length guidance, and resume action-verb and bullet-writing resources: https://ocs.yale.edu/channels/resumes/
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Career Center, "How to Resume," on one-page length guidance, action verbs, and what to leave off including photographs and decorative formatting: https://www.careercenter.illinois.edu/howtoresume

## Where to go next

Once the resume itself is solid, the next question is usually whether it will survive an applicant tracking system before a person ever reads it: [the ATS guide](/blog/career/ats-friendly-resume) covers what those systems check for and how to format around them. For everything else in the career section, [the career hub](/blog/career) lists every guide in one place.

When an offer comes in, [the salary calculator](/calculators/salary-calculator) and [the hourly-to-salary calculator](/calculators/hourly-to-salary-calculator) let you compare it against your current pay on equal terms, and [the take-home paycheck calculator](/calculators/take-home-paycheck-calculator) turns a gross figure into what actually lands in your account. If you are weighing whether a new offer has kept pace with inflation since your last raise, [inflation-adjusted salary growth](/blog/finance/inflation-adjusted-salary-growth) walks through that comparison.

## Common questions

**What are the 5 main sections of a resume?**

Contact information, a summary (or occasionally an objective), work experience, skills, and education. Almost every format and every country's guidance agrees on these five; what changes by career stage and region is the order they appear in and how much space each one gets. Certifications, projects, volunteering and languages are common additions but are optional, not core sections.

**What should I put on a resume if I want it to actually get read?**

Your name and contact details, a short summary tailored to the specific role, 3 to 6 quantified bullet points per job under work experience, a skills list matched to the job description's own language, and your education. Cut anything that repeats itself, any bullet that only describes a duty with no result attached, and any section, such as a long list of hobbies, that does not help the reader decide whether to interview you.

**How do I write a resume summary?**

Write it last, after the rest of the resume is drafted, so it can restate your strongest, most concrete points rather than vague adjectives. Three to four lines is enough: your role or field and years of experience, one or two of your best quantified achievements, and, if relevant, a line on what you are looking for next. Avoid opening with "Hardworking professional seeking opportunities," since it says nothing an employer cannot already assume.

**Should I use a resume objective or a resume summary?**

Use a summary in almost every case, since it leads with what you offer rather than what you want. An objective, a single sentence stating the role you are seeking, is worth using only when you are changing careers entirely and need one line to explain why an otherwise unrelated work history fits the job you are applying for.

**How do I write a resume with no work experience?**

Lead with education, and treat coursework, class projects, part-time or seasonal jobs, and volunteering as legitimate material for bullet points, written with the same verb-scope-result structure as any other bullet. A part-time retail or food-service job still demonstrates reliability, handling money accurately and working with the public; describe it specifically rather than apologizing for it. Put education above work experience in the section order, which matches how career-stage guidance for students and recent graduates is generally structured.

**How long should a resume be, one page or two?**

One page for most students, early-career and mid-career candidates. Two pages becomes reasonable once you have around a decade or more of clearly relevant experience, several distinct roles worth describing in depth, or you work in a field where longer resumes are the norm, such as academia, medicine, law or senior technical leadership. The real test is whether every line earns its place, not a fixed page count.

**Should a functional resume be used to hide a career gap?**

It is not the safest way to handle one. A functional or skills-based resume separates your skills from the jobs and dates where you used them, and hiring managers and recruiters commonly read that separation as an attempt to hide something, whether that is a gap, a series of short stints, or an unclear career direction. A combination format, which leads with a skills or achievements summary but still includes a full reverse-chronological work history underneath, gets you the same benefit of leading with strengths without that credibility cost.

**Should I put a photo on my resume?**

Not if you are applying in the US, UK, Canada or Australia; the US EEOC specifically advises that employers should not ask for an applicant photograph, and it is standard practice to leave one off in all four of those countries. In parts of continental Europe, the Middle East and East Asia, a small, professional photo is common practice and often expected. See [resume vs CV and regional conventions](/tools/resume-builder#resume-vs-cv-and-regional-conventions) for the fuller regional breakdown.

**Do I need to put references on a resume?**

In most US resumes, no; leave references off entirely and provide them separately if an employer asks, since a "References available on request" line takes up space better used for another bullet. In the UK, a references section is a more common CV convention, and the UK National Careers Service lists it among a CV's typical sections, so follow the local convention for wherever you are applying.

**How far back should a resume go?**

For most mid-career and senior candidates, the last 10 to 15 years of clearly relevant experience is enough; older roles can be summarized in a single line or dropped entirely unless they are unusually relevant to the job you want now. Early-career candidates should simply include everything they have, since there is not yet a long history to trim.

**What font size should a resume use?**

A body text size of 10 to 12 points in a plain, widely available font such as Arial, Calibri or Times New Roman, with your name and section headings a few points larger for contrast. The UK National Careers Service specifically recommends size 11 or bigger in one of those fonts, and career centers generally advise against decorative or unusual fonts that can distract from the content or render inconsistently across devices.

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_Source: [Do The Calculation](https://dothecalculation.com/blog/career/how-to-write-a-resume). Quote freely with attribution and a link to this page._