The goal of a resume or CV is to tell the story of your experiences, education, and qualifications. Resume and CV guidelines may vary from industry to industry, so it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with specific industry examples.

Resume Formatting Tips

• Be concise. Use brief statements in the form of bullets or sentences.
• Keep font size to 10, 11, or 12 point and set margins to no less than 0.5 inch all around.
• Do not use the word “I” or other first-person pronouns.
• Use past tense in describing past positions and use present tense for your current position(s).
• Include measurable achievements (Ex: Improved efficiency by 140% in 2021)
• Be consistent in your use of punctuation throughout the document. For instance, either use periods at the end of all your bullets or not.
• Use bold, italics and underlining formatting to break up the text and make the document easy to read.
• Use bolds, italics, underlines, and capitalization to draw attention.
• Follow a chronological, functional, or hybrid format.
• Use a footer with page numbers and your last name, in case pages get separate.

Required Sections

Heading: Name, email address, mailing address (only one), and phone number

Education: List academic degrees, with in progress or most recently earned first.

• Name of institution, city and state, degree type and major, month and year degree was (will be) awarded

Relevant Experience: List positions that show off your skills and expertise. You can group experiences into relevant categories to enhance your resume/CV (e.g. Research, Teaching, and Administration). For each position, include:

• Title, organization name, city and state, dates position was held.
• Bullet points that summarize your activities/duties, accomplishments, and successes. Use action verbs.

Optional Sections

Qualifications or Skills: A summary of particular or relevant strengths or skills which you want to highlight. Typically, this is not included as a separate section, but addressed in other sections. Occasionally, it may be appropriate to list special computing or language skills.

Grants Received: Include name of grant, name of granting agency, date received, and title or purpose of research project.

Institutional Service: List institutional committees you have served on, including offices held, student groups you have supervised, or special academic projects you have assisted with.

Certifications: List all relevant certifications and the year received.

Professional Associations: Memberships in national, regional, state, and local professional organizations. Also, list significant appointments to positions or committees in these associations. Student memberships in professional associations are appropriate.

Recent/Current Research: Description of research projects recently conducted or in progress. Include the type of research and a brief description of the purpose.

Community Involvement: Appropriate and relevant volunteer work, church work, community service organizations, etc.

Educational Travel: Names of countries, dates, purpose.

Languages: List the languages you can speak and your levels of proficiency

Publications: Give bibliographic citations for articles, pamphlets, chapters in books, research reports, or any other publications that you have authored or co-authored. Use the format appropriate to your particular academic discipline for a clean look. 

Presentations (Oral and Poster): Give titles of professional presentations, name of conference or event, dates and location, and, if appropriate in your discipline, also include a brief description. Use the format appropriate to your particular academic discipline for a consistent and clean look.

Honors and Awards: Receipt of competitive scholarships, fellowships, and assistantships; names of scholastic honors; teaching or research awards.

References: Three to five are appropriate. If you are responding to an advertisement that asks for references, include those requested on a separate addendum sheet.