Resume sections and structure

The short answer

Most resumes need five parts: your name and contact details, a short profile or summary, experience, education and skills. Add languages, certifications, projects, volunteer work, awards or publications only when they prove something the target job asks for.

Order the sections by what is strongest for this application. For most people that means experience first. New graduates usually lead with education. Career switchers often put a projects section, or a profile that explains the switch, above older unrelated work.

Use standard names for the sections so both people and software know what they are reading.

The core sections, and what belongs in each

Each core section has one job. Keeping to that job is what makes a resume quick to read.

Contact details: your name, city and country, email, phone, and a LinkedIn profile or portfolio if you keep it current. A full street address is rarely needed.
Profile or summary: two to four sentences on what you do, at what scale, your strongest piece of proof and what you want next. It is a summary of the page, not a list of personality traits.
Experience: your roles in reverse chronological order. Each has a job title, employer, location if relevant, dates, and three to five bullets for recent roles, fewer for older ones.
Education: degree, institution and dates. Coursework, grades and student activities belong here only early in your career.
Skills: the tools, methods and technical skills you would be happy to discuss in an interview. Group them if there are many.

Personal details depend on where you apply

In the US and the UK, employers generally do not expect a photo, date of birth or marital status, and leaving them off is common advice. Norms differ in other countries, so follow local practice and the employer's instructions. When in doubt, leave out anything that says more about you than about your work.

Optional sections that help

An optional section earns its place by proving something the job needs. If it does not, it costs space and attention.

Projects: strong for engineers, analysts, designers, new graduates and career switchers. Treat each project like a role, with a title, a date and one or two bullets.
Certifications: include the issuer and the year. If one is in progress, say so and give the expected date.
Languages: give each a level. A standard scale such as A1 to C2, or plain words such as fluent or conversational, both work if they are honest.
Volunteer experience: useful when it shows skills the job asks for, or fills the story of a career break.
Awards and publications: worth including when they are relevant and recent enough to matter.
A custom section, such as selected talks or patents, when your field values it.

Sections to leave out

Some sections survive on resumes out of habit. "References available on request" is assumed, so the line adds nothing. An objective statement, "Seeking a challenging position in a dynamic company", says what you want rather than what you offer. A profile does that job better. A hobbies section is optional at best. Keep it only if a hobby says something relevant, or is a genuine conversation starter you are happy to talk about.

Order and emphasis

Put your strongest proof for this job highest on the page. A recruiter's first pass is short, and what sits at the top of page one shapes how the rest is read.

Experienced, same field: contact, profile, experience, skills, education, then any optional sections.
New graduate: contact, profile, education, projects or internships, skills, then any work experience.
Career switcher: contact, a profile that explains the switch, projects or the most relevant experience, skills, earlier experience, education.
Returning after a break: the same as experienced, with the break explained in one line. The employment gaps guide covers how.
Within each role, put the bullet most relevant to the target job first.

A worked example

This example is fictional. Marco taught high school chemistry for eight years and is moving into instructional design. Over the past year he completed a certificate in instructional design and, as a volunteer, built three e-learning modules for a literacy nonprofit.

His current resume runs in this order: contact details; an objective, "Seeking a challenging role where I can grow"; experience, with eight years of teaching bullets that open with classroom management and parent meetings and end, near the bottom, with the curriculum and assessments he designed for three courses; education; a skills line reading "Microsoft Office, teamwork, communication"; and hobbies.

A recruiter for an instructional design role would read the objective, then a teaching job, and might stop before finding the e-learning work, which is the most relevant thing he has done. Nothing on the page is false. It is simply in the wrong order.

Marco's resume, reordered

He keeps every fact and changes the structure.

The objective becomes a profile: "Chemistry teacher of eight years moving into instructional design. Designed the curriculum and assessments for three courses, and built three e-learning modules in Articulate Rise for a literacy nonprofit as a volunteer. Completed a certificate in instructional design this year."
A projects section comes next, with the three modules as one entry: the nonprofit, the dates, what each module teaches and the tool he built them in.
The skills line lists what he can discuss: Articulate Rise, curriculum design, assessment design, Google Workspace. Teamwork and communication go, because the bullets show them.
Experience follows. Within the teaching role, the curriculum and assessment bullets move to the top. Classroom management and parent meetings move down and get shorter.
A certifications section names the certificate, the issuer and the year. Education follows it. Hobbies go.

What did not change

His job title stays "Chemistry Teacher". Retitling it "Learning Designer" would be a claim his former school would not confirm. His dates stay exactly as they were. The eight years of teaching are still on the page, because they are real experience and because a gap would raise more questions than a teaching job does. The resume now tells a reader in the first few lines what he wants to do next and what proves he can do it.

What usually goes wrong

Structure problems are rarely about missing information. They are about information in the wrong place.

Creative section names. "My journey" or "Toolbox" makes both people and parsers guess.
An objective instead of a profile, saying what you want rather than what you offer.
A skills section made of personality traits rather than skills.
Education first for someone with ten years of experience.
The strongest proof buried on page two, under older or less relevant roles.
Optional sections that prove nothing for this job, added because the template had a slot.
A profile that repeats the first job's bullets word for word.
Personal details that invite bias, such as a date of birth, in countries where they are not expected.

How Verlane handles it

Verlane keeps your resume as sections you can move, rename and hide, rather than as a fixed page.

The standard sections are Profile, Employment history, Education, Skills and Languages. You can add Projects, Certifications, Awards, Publications, Volunteer experience or a custom section.
In the editor you can reorder, rename and hide sections. A hidden section stays saved, but it is left out of the download and out of the match score.
Optional personal fields such as date of birth and photo are yours to fill in or leave blank. A blank field does not appear on the document.
Languages are recorded with a level on the A1 to C2 scale. When a posting asks for a language your resume does not list, Verlane asks you about it instead of guessing.
The free health check reports whether the essential sections are there: experience, education, a summary and at least three skills.
It also flags personal details that can invite bias, such as a date of birth or a full home address, and dates that point to age, such as old graduation years.