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What a resume includes

The editable sections that make up an ATSReady resume and where to complete missing information.

Resumes · about 2 minutes

On this page
  1. The 13 sections
  2. What you can and cannot reorder
  3. If you are starting from existing material

An ATSReady resume is built from 13 editable sections, in a fixed order.

The résumé editor with the section rail on the left, the open section's form in the middle, and the rendered document beside them.
Every section named in this page appears in the editor: the rail holds them in the order the document uses, and the form column names the one you are in. The rail alone is icons, which is why the figure is the editor rather than the rail.

The rail is part of the desktop editor. Below 1024 px the resume route renders the document and no form, so there is no rail to open a section from — see Resume editing on a phone.

The 13 sections

These are the names the rail uses, in the order the rail lists them:

  1. Personal Information
  2. Professional Summary
  3. Skills
  4. Work Experience
  5. Education
  6. Certifications
  7. Awards
  8. Projects
  9. Languages
  10. Publications
  11. Patents
  12. Extracurricular Activities
  13. Interests & Hobbies

You do not need to fill every section. Empty sections can stay unused, and template output depends on the content you keep in the document. Most of these sections can also be filled from your career record rather than typed — see Push Professional Journey content to a resume.

What you can and cannot reorder

Section order is not a setting. There is no control for it in the editor, in template settings, or in market settings.

Two orders are involved, and neither one is yours to change. The rail order above is the editor's, and it is the same for every resume. The order the sections print in belongs to the template: Harvard leads with Education, Tech places Projects ahead of Education, and the two two-column templates split the sections between a sidebar and a main column instead of running one sequence. Choosing a template is therefore the only way the printed order changes — see Resume templates.

What you can reorder is the entries inside a section. Work Experience, Education, Projects, and Skills each let you drag their rows into a different order, and that order is yours. It moves entries within one section, never the sections themselves.

If you are starting from existing material