Explanation of Resume Template and Formatting

This page explains the sections of the free resume template and what information is appropriate for each section.

Name and Title

Your name should appear in capital letters in the font style and size indicated in the template.

Professional Profile

The Professional Profile section should provide a short summary of your career and related professional experience. Information that you may include is your number of years of experience, areas of expertise, and other noteworthy tidbits of information. This section serves as an introduction to you and your credentials.

Please be certain to write this section in paragraph form, using complete sentences. You should write in the third person, using active voice and present tense or present perfect tense (ex. John Doe combines technical expertise with… , John has demonstrated success in… ). Remember to keep your synopsis short. You will be able to describe your experience and achievements in greater detail in the Professional Experience and Career Highlights sections.

Education

Use the Education section to list the name of the institution(s) which issued your degree(s), the year the degree(s) was/were received, the particular degree(s) received, and any concentrations of study you may have had. If you do not hold a formal degree, simply eliminate this section from your resume.

Relevant Skills

You should use the Relevant Skills section to display all relevant technical and computer skills you have obtained. Please list only those skills in which you have achieved proficiency. By listing only those skills, you avoid misrepresenting yourself to potential employers.

Career Highlights

In the Career Highlights section, you have the opportunity to share some of your more outstanding accomplishments with past employers. Please try to include at least three highlights. You should present your highlights in a bulleted format. Because the highlights will be presented in bulleted form, you may use fragments rather than complete sentences. If you use sentence fragments in this section, the reader can read and digest the shorter, bulleted highlights more quickly and easily than they could if they were forced to extract your highlights from a paragraph of complete sentences.

Professional Experience

Use the Professional Experience section to detail your relevant career experiences and history. The template serves as a guide for formatting this section. Be sure to outline your job responsibilities and other relevant experiences in enough detail to provide potential employers with an impressive picture of what you have done.

This section will let potential employers know what you have done and how you did it. Describe the duties you performed, the responsibilities relative to your project, and the techniques employed/software used. Provide quantitative information and an overall summary of the scope of the project if possible.

As in the Career Highlights section, you may use sentence fragments in the bulleted format of the Professional Experience section. Each bulleted statement should begin with a past-tense verb.

See the actual free resume template here.