Building a resume
A resume is a brief summary of your education, skills, and experiences. Employers will read it to understand quickly how you are prepared to fulfill job responsibilities.
Required resume sections
This section should be placed at the top of your resume. It will provide the employer with your professional contact information. For example, provide your IU Indianapolis email address that includes your name instead of gocolts@gmail.com.
Ensure you include your:
- Mailing address
- Primary phone number
- Professional email
- LinkedIn profile (optional)
This section provides a quick picture of your current educational pursuits. Now that you are in college, you won’t need to list your high school degree. You should include your:
- Degree type and major
- School and its location
- Anticipated graduation month and year
- Degree concentration and minor (if applicable)
- GPA (optional)
This section uses action statements (see below) to highlight any experience that has helped you gain skills valuable to the position for which you are applying. This can include any of the following:
- Employment
- Volunteer work
- Internships
- Significant leadership roles
- Paid or unpaid experiences that demonstrate your skills
When listing experiences, include:
- Title of your role
- Company or organization for which you worked or volunteered
- City and state of company or organization
- Time frame that you worked
- Specific action statements to highlight your completed duties
Final tip: List experiences that have ended using past tense and experiences still happening using present tense. Also, if an experience hasn’t ended, list “Present” in place of the end month and year.
Optional resume sections
In addition to the required sections, you may want to include some of the information below. Include optional sections only if you think it will showcase your particular skills or qualities as a potential employee.
If you decide to include this in your resume, keep it concise. This brief statement should summarize the type of work you want and a few skills you bring to a position.
The goal is to showcase your particular skills in the action statements you list with your experience. If you include this section, focus on technical, language, or professional skills that you have refined in some way. These might be skills you have acquired through academic coursework, trainings, special projects, or leadership roles.
You might include this section if you have completed relevant trainings or earned related certifications or licenses. For example, if applying as a research assistant, you might want to include if you have received Internal Review Board (IRB) training. If applying to a position in education, you might want to include if you have received a teaching license or first-aid training.
You can include this section to highlight involvement that will showcase your skills and interests related to the position, but are not in your experience section. If you had a particular role within the organization, you should include that with the organization. Your list of organizations might include some of the following:
- Student organizations
- Community organizations
- Professional organizations
- Volunteer groups
- Honor societies
You can include this section to showcase any particular achievements for which you have been recognized. When listing awards, be sure to note who presented the award and when.
Best practices for formatting
Consider these strategies for formatting your resume.
- Start with a fresh document. Avoid fill-in-the-blank templates because they can be challenging to edit once more content is added.
- Use standard, professional fonts (e.g., Times New Roman, Arial, Calibri).
- Be consistent. If you bold one position title, do not italicize the other. This will create a clean, easy-to-read document.
- Choose 11- or 12-point font sizes for content. Use no more than 14-point font size for section headers.
- Only use bold, italics, underline, and horizontal lines to emphasize important information and to separate your sections.
- Ensure that the spacing between each section is the same. Margins, sections, and bulleted statements should be uniform.
Building a successful action statement
Use action statements to describe your experiences. These will communicate what you did, how you did it, and why it was important.
What?Job Duty
Who?People
How?Skill
Why?Result
Example: Developed marketing materials using Adobe InDesign to promote the Office of Student Employment.
Action verb list
| Research | Financial | Communicate | Helping | Management | Organizing |
| Collected | Allocated | Addressed | Advocated | Administered | Approved |
| Evaluated | Appraised | Marketed | Assisted | Delegated | Compiled |
| Interviewed | Balanced | Discussed | Coached | Executed | Implemented |
| Investigated | Estimated | Explained | Educated | Planned | Maintained |
| Surveyed | Projected | Recruited | Referred | Produced | Scheduled |
Top five things to know about resumes
- Organize content in each section of your resume from most recent to least recent.
- Be sure your resume is only one to two pages in length. This means you should only include information that is relevant to the position for which you’re applying.
- Make tailoring your resume to different positions easier by saving a draft of your overall resume with all of your past and current information.
- Save your resume as a PDF before uploading into Handshake or sending to an employer. This will ensure that your formatting stays the way you intended it.
- Change the file name to LastName_FirstName_Resume when sending a resume. Doing this helps employers keep track of your materials.
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