Resume Sections: What to Include and What Order to Put Them In (2026)
Most resume advice argues about what to write. Far less of it covers what to write it under — which is the decision that determines whether a reader finds your strongest material in the six seconds they spend on the first pass.
The five essential sections
| Section | Length | What it is doing |
|---|---|---|
| Contact information | 2–3 lines | Name, phone, email, city/state, LinkedIn. No full street address needed. |
| Professional summary | 2–4 lines | The argument for why you fit this role. Rewritten per application. |
| Work experience | 50–70% of the page | The evidence. Reverse chronological, most recent first. |
| Skills | 3–6 lines | Where the hard keywords live. Tools, technologies, methods — not soft traits. |
| Education | 1–3 lines | Degree, institution. Year optional once you are 10+ years out. |
Work experience should dominate. If your summary and skills sections together take more room than your experience, the resume is arguing rather than demonstrating, and readers discount it accordingly.
What order should resume sections be in?
There are three orders that work. Pick by situation, not by preference.
Standard order — most candidates with 2+ years of experience: Contact → Summary → Work Experience → Skills → Education → Optional sections
Student / recent graduate order: Contact → Summary → Education → Projects or Internships → Skills → Work Experience
Career changer / technical specialist order: Contact → Summary → Skills → Work Experience → Education
The principle behind all three: the section that makes your strongest case goes above the fold. A software engineer with an unusual stack is better served by a skills block near the top; a marketer with eight years at recognisable companies is not, and should lead with experience.
One thing does not move: contact information goes first, and it goes in the body of the document rather than the header. Content placed in a Word header or footer is the single most common cause of a parser losing someone's email address entirely.
Which optional sections are worth adding?
Each optional section costs space that work experience could use. Add one only if it clears the bar of "a hiring manager for this role would want it."
- Certifications — Add when the certification is a requirement or a differentiator (PMP, CPA, AWS, RN licence). Skip generic online course completions.
- Projects — High value for students, career changers, and engineers. Low value once you have a decade of relevant employment.
- Volunteer experience — Add when it demonstrates a skill the paid work does not, or fills a period of unemployment productively.
- Publications / patents / conference talks — Essential in academia, research, and senior technical roles. Noise elsewhere.
- Awards — Only named, external awards. "Employee of the Month" costs more credibility than it earns.
- Languages — Add when genuinely relevant to the role or region. Be honest about fluency level.
Sections that should almost never appear: hobbies and interests, references or "references available upon request", a photo, date of birth, marital status, and a full street address. In the US market these range from wasted space to actively harmful.
How many sections should a resume have?
Five to seven. Below five you are missing something essential; above seven the page fragments into blocks too small to say anything, and the reader's eye stops finding a path through it.
If you are tempted to add an eighth section, the better move is usually to fold its content into an existing one. A "Technical Proficiencies" block and a "Skills" block are the same section with two names.
Getting the section labels right
Which sections you include is a content decision. What you call them is a parsing decision, and applicant tracking systems are considerably less imaginative than people are. A section headed "Where I've Made an Impact" will be read by a human as your work history and by a parser as unclassifiable text.
Use conventional labels — Work Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications — and keep them on their own line. The ATS resume section headings guide covers the eight labels that parse cleanly everywhere and the creative synonyms that break field mapping.
Two structural rules matter as much as the labels:
- One column. Sidebars and two-column layouts scramble section order during parsing. See the single column layout guide.
- No tables or text boxes around section content, for the same reason.
Check your sections actually parsed
The fastest way to know whether your sections survived is to look at what a parser extracted. Run the file through our free resume checker — no signup — and confirm each section came back under the right heading with its content attached. If "Skills" is empty or your experience entries merged into one block, the structure needs fixing before the content is worth polishing.
If you would rather start from a structure that already has the sections in the right order, the ATS resume templates are free .docx downloads with no signup — single column, standard headings, no tables or sidebars.
Once the skeleton holds, the content work is matching what sits inside those sections to the specific posting — which is what the resume optimizer does against a pasted job description.
Frequently asked questions
- What sections should a resume have?
- Five sections are essential: contact information, a professional summary, work experience, skills, and education. Optional sections such as certifications, projects, volunteer work, and awards should be added only when they are relevant to the specific role. Most strong resumes have between five and seven sections in total.
- What order should resume sections be in?
- Contact information first, then a summary, then whichever of work experience or education makes your strongest case. Candidates with a few years of experience should lead with work experience; students and recent graduates should lead with education and projects. Skills sit high for technical roles and career changers, lower for everyone else.
- How many sections should a resume have?
- Five to seven. Fewer than five usually means something essential is missing, and more than seven fragments the page into blocks too small to make a point. If you want an eighth section, fold its content into an existing one instead — a separate 'Technical Proficiencies' block is almost always just the skills section again.
- What are the main sections of a resume?
- The main sections are contact information, professional summary, work experience, skills, and education. Work experience should occupy the largest share of the page, typically 50 to 70 percent, because it carries the evidence that the other sections only assert.
- Should skills go before or after work experience?
- After, for most candidates — work experience is the evidence and should sit higher. Move skills above experience when the specific tools and technologies are the main qualification, which is common for engineers, and when you are changing fields and your transferable skills argue better than your job titles do.
- What sections should you not include on a resume?
- Leave out hobbies and interests, references or 'references available upon request', a photo, date of birth, marital status, and your full street address. In the US market these range from wasted space to actively harmful, and none of them affect whether you are shortlisted.
- Do resume sections affect ATS parsing?
- Yes, but through their labels and layout rather than their number. Parsers map content to database fields by recognising conventional headings such as Work Experience and Education, so unconventional names can leave a section unclassified. Keep headings standard, on their own line, in a single-column layout with no tables or text boxes.