6 Important Resume Sections for Winning Application

Why the resume sections are important? 

Resumes should include more than simply fundamental details regarding your work experience and skill set. If any company is interested in recruiting you, then must make a strong case for your value. Nonetheless, it would be helpful if you organized the resume parts to create a story about your accomplishments, professional background, and communication abilities. 

Each section of resume contains a specific type of information and has special headings so recruiters can quickly identify your employment history. Some bullet points highlight your achievements and extra core competencies. 

There are the following important parts of a resume:

1. Contact information
2. Professional Summary
3. Skills section
4. Experience 
5. Education 
6. Optional section 

Contact information

The first section of the resume should include detailed personal information. You can add your full name, email address, phone number, and location. Ensure that personal information is at the top when you write a resume. Here is the following header section of contact information; 

1. Full name: Include first and last name in your resume (Jhon David). Ensure that the name you’re adding same one that is used in your LinkedIn profile, other job search documents, and professional social media accounts.
2. Phone number: Adding your phone number is an excellent option. When you’re applying for any Job, and hiring managers want to call you for an interview, they will contact you at your cell number. 
3. Location: Include home address, but if you’re uncomfortable entering the address, don’t worry; you can enter only the state and city.
4. Email Address: Create a new email address to apply for the post. Use professional emails for the Job, like Jhohnsmith@gmailcom; if use an unprofessional email (john_doe_1234@domain.com), you will not be considered a serious candidate. An accurate email allows you to communicate with the recruiter. 
5. Social media accounts: You can add social media accounts in this section if these accounts describe your working history, such as LinkedIn profiles, other websites, and portfolio URLs. 

Professional Summary

After the contact information, the next section is a professional or objective summary. This part highlights wants, needs, and goals of Job seekers. The objective summary focuses on what you offer the hiring managers by describing the qualifications, achievements, and accomplishments.

 If you’re confused about how to write an attractive objective summary, here is an example for you: 

(Job title) with (2 years of experience) in (Job-related expertise and competencies). (Highlight a measurable accomplishment that demonstrates your value). (Describe a second professional success highlighting your abilities and how you used them to create value for an employer. Use real numbers to quantify that value).

Skills section

Your core competencies and skills are important for getting hired. In this section, you can emphasize your hard and soft skills related to the Job role. If you’re not sure what to put in this section, you can use some tools to identify the skills according to the post, such as Word Cloud generator. This tool will help you spot specific skills and keywords often mentioned for those jobs. 

It’s essential to carefully read the Job listing to determine which skills and experiences the company requires. If you include the exact keywords in resume, you will get noticed and have a higher chance of being selected. 

Experience section

A chronological resume is the best format to describe your professional experiences. This type of resume will reflect your employment history in reverse chronological order, which means your recent experience will be on the top, and your earlier experience will be listed at the end of your application. 

You can include every professional experience in this paragraph, whether you gained knowledge from anywhere. You worked as a volunteer or had an unpaid or paid internship and training; you can use this background if you have little working history and want to change your career. 

List the measurable achievements that you have held. Focus on using the skills to provide value to the employers rather than list the duties and responsibilities. 

Education Section

After the experience part comes the education section, which follows your qualifications in a chronological resume format, highlighting your current degree at the top and most recent degree in chronological order. 

• Mention Degree Name.
• Name of Institution
• Starting or ending years of degree 
• CGPA (optional)
• Include some academic achievements 
• Some Honors (optional)

You can include your CGPA. We recommend not including it in your resume if you have less than a 3.5. However, if you have a strong employment history and think it will cover your CGPA gap, you can mention it. 

If you have additional degree-related courses, you can add them to educational section to increase qualification value. 

Other Section

In the other section, you can highlight your unique qualifications, such as hobbies and interests, certifications, languages, or volunteering experience.

• You’ve completed some courses, certifications, and workshops or think these can enhance the value of your qualification; can list them in the other section.
• If you receive any awards or achievements that you cannot mention in the main parts of a resume but can highlight your accomplishments, you can mention them in this. 
• If you have done some projects related to this post during your studies or expect that it can demonstrate skills and experience, you can describe them in the optional section. 

Key takeaways

We have discussed tips about what should a resume include and how to make it stand out. Here are the following points we’ve discussed:

• You can create an outstanding application by creating sections of resume: contact information, professional summary, skills and abilities, experience, educational, and other section
• You should make resume stand out by following the correct format of the resume 
• All information should be aligned with the Job role.

Recommended Reading

10 Soft Skills Examples to Elevate Your Resume