Crafting Your Professional Résumé

Students sitting at tables in a classroom, engaged in group discussions.

Crafting Your Professional Résumé

Developing Your Personal Marketing Tool

A résumé is your personal marketing tool. It briefly and clearly introduces your qualifications to an employer by displaying your education, experience, skills, and training in a succinct and tailored manner. A great résumé will generate interviews for jobs, internships, academic and education abroad programs, and scholarships. 

Contact Information Section Education Section Experience Section Additional Sections

Essential Résumé Components

  • Name and contact information 
  • Headers 
  • Education 
  • Experience (work, activities, leadership, volunteerism) 
  • Skills/Training 
  • Bullet Statements 

Setting up the Page

Your résumé is a representation of your brand, so you want to make sure it looks professional.
 

Craft a New Résumé

“I have a résumé from high school; can I just use that?” In short, no. While your high school résumé is a great starting point, these documents typically list ALL the experiences you have. At the college level, employers care more about the depth of your involvement and how those experiences relate to them rather than a list of all the experiences you have ever been involved in. 

Avoid Templates

When determining how your résumé should look, it is important to not use a stylized template. These templates are often overused, unprofessional in appearance, challenging to read, and formatted in ways that make it difficult to include the information employers desire. Instead, use one of the College of Business approved résumé formats to ensure your document looks professional and is easy to keep up-to-date. 

Limit Your Résumé to 1 Page

One way to think about your document is that it should be a “highlight reel” of your most relevant experiences. Be strategic about what story you want to tell, and keep only the experiences that will matter to the reader. 

Saving Your Résumé

When saving your résumé, there are a few critical pieces of information to keep in mind:
 

Rename Your Document

The name of your résumé is something that an employer will see and the name of the file should make sense to others. 

What we see students do: 

  • Résumé
  • Undergraduate Student 1 
  • Updated Résumé 

What you should do: 

  • Alex Business Hudl Resume 
  • AlexBusiness_HudlResume 
  • HudlResume-ABusiness 

Save as a PDF

While it is best practice to save your résumé as a PDF prior to submitting so the formatting is locked, some systems require you to upload a .doc file. Be sure to check the instructions when completing your application. 

Master Résumé

Since your résumé should only be one page, you might wonder what to do with the rest of your content. A tool that will be helpful as you continue to gain experience and have to shift experiences of your document is a master résumé. A master résumé is multiple page document that can be used to track all your education, employment, achievements, involvement, and more. If you keep a master résumé, it will make updating and tailoring future résumés a lot easier since you will just need to copy and paste the text you need into a new résumé. 

Contact Information Section

The very first thing an employer should notice when looking at your résumé is your contact information. They need to know whose résumé they are reviewing. When putting together your contact information, you must include your name, location, phone number, and email address. If employers do not know this information, how will they contact you for an interview? Include each of these gives an employer multiple ways to contact you. 
 

What Should be Included

Required Information 

  • Name
  • City, State and Zip Code
  • Email
  • Phone Number

Optional Information

  • CliftonStrengths
  • LinkedIn URL

Do Not Include

  • Picture
  • Social Security of Tax ID#
  • Birthdate


*While it is required to include your contact information on your résumé, there may be some times that you want to limit access to certain information. For example, if you are uploading your résumé to a job board or attaching it to your LinkedIn profile, you may want to remove your phone number to protect against spam phone calls. You should also not include your full mailing address - only your city, state, and zip code. At minimum, you should leave your email address on your résumé so employers can contact you. 

Handling Nicknames 

If you go by a different name than what is included on your birth certificate, such as a nickname, it can be nice to include that in your contact information so employers know your preferred name. For example, Joseph David Business, who goes by J.D., could write Joseph (J.D.) Business. If you are an international student who prefers to use an English name, you can include that in parentheses. For example, Fei (Nancy) Long. This will help employers recognize your given name on official documents but call you by your preferred name when interacting with you.

Résumé Contact Information Example

Alex M. Business 
Lincoln, NE 68521 | 402.555.5555 | alex.business@unl.edu 
www.linkedin.com/alexbusiness 
Input, Positivity, Ideation, Achiever, Learner

Education Section

Having a degree or pursuing a degree, in many cases, is a basic requirement for many jobs, so it is essential to include information about your educational background on your résumé.

The Education Section is located directly below the contact information and is the first major section. Eventually, when you have been working for 3-5 years and have more professional experience, you can move your experience section to the top as that will be more relevant than your education. For now though, it should be the first section on your résumé.

 

Essential Componants

Required Information

  • Institution 
  • Location (city/state)
  • Degree
  • Expected Graduation Date
  • Major

 

Optional Information

  • Minor(s)
  • Certificate(s)
  • GPA (cumulative or major)*

 

Degree vs. Major

Your degree and your major are two different things. All College of Business graduates at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln earn the exact same degree - a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration - but your major will be different depending on the program of study you have selected. Make sure that your degree and major are both listed accurately on your résumé

When to List Your GPA

*In terms of when to list your GPA and when not to, the general rule of thumb is that if your GPA is 3.0 or above, you should list it. If it is below 2.5, do not list it. Some industries and organizations put a lot of emphasis on GPA while others put more weight on your experiences and skills. In either case, you need to make sure your GPA is accurate. You should never round your GPA up, because if your GPA is incorrect, an employer may assume that you were trying to lie in your application. It is not worth it!

Study Abroad

Studying abroad is an excellent experience that you will want to highlight on your résumé to show employers that you come with a global perspective. Adding study abroad experience to your résumé is simple. All you do is add the university you studied at, the location, the program, credits, and date. Adding it as a second institution ensures that it does not get lost as a footnote among everything else on your résumé.

Multiple Institutions

If you have a degree from another institution or transfer credits, this is also something you can include in your education section if you have the space. Like listing your current institution, you will want to include the institution name, location, degree sought, and dates of attendance. 

Sample Education Sections

College of Business Student
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE
Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, May 202x
Major: Marketing; Minor: Psychology; GPA: 3.89/4.00

Dual Matriculation (Degrees from Two Colleges at UNL)
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE
Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, December 202x (expected)
Major: Marketing; Minor: Psychology; GPA: 3.74/4.00

Bachelor of Arts, December 202x(expected)
Major: Communication Studies

Study Abroad Experience
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE
Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, May 202x (expected)
Major: Marketing; Minor: Psychology

Oxford University, Oxford, England
Nebraska at Oxford Program (6 credits of Economics), Summer 202x

Transfer Student
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE
Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, Fall 202x (expected)
Major: Marketing; Minor: Psychology; GPA: 3.99/4.00

Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS
12 hours of transfer credit, August 202x - May 202x

Experience Section

The experience section of your résumé is one of the most important things that employers want to see, because it is how they can quickly determine if you possess the skills necessary to succeed in their positions. Your experience section should be located directly below your education section.

Experience Section Essential Components
  • Organization Name
  • Location (city, state)
  • Position Title/Role
  • Dates of Employment/Involvement
  • Bullet Statements

What is Experience?

  • Full Time/Part Time Jobs
  • Self-Employment
  • Internships
  • Volunteer Experiences
  • Involvement
  • Class Projects
Examples

Hyvee, Lincoln, NE
Grocery Clerk, May 20xx - Present

  • Manage and credit card transactions at checkout counter in a quick and efficient manner
  • Address customers’ needs and concerns through effective communication in person and virtually
  • Monitor product inventory using Excel to guarantee adequate stock

Sports and Event Marketing Research Project, Lincoln, NE
Presenter/Group Member, August 20xx - December 20xx

  • Researched social media opportunities by conducting needs assessments, presenting proposals and recommendations to event sponsors

United States Marine Corps - Marine Aircraft Group 15, Various Locations
Section Leader, March 20xx - August 20xx

  • Managed on-site and remote personnel to execute tactical and support missions through providing efficient oversight and paying close attention to detail

You may be wondering what to do if your résumé is full. It happens. The more you get involved and the more experiences you have, the quicker your résumé fills up. Remember, you only have one page! So what should you do if you have an experience you want to make sure an employer sees, but you do not have much room? Here are two suggestions:

  • Remove some information from your résumé to make room for more relevant experience. Start with the information that is not entirely relevant to the job or experience that is furthest in the past.
  • The second solution, if you want to make sure an employer sees an older experience, is to include an employer from the past, but just list the main information and remove the bullet statements.

Additional Résumé Sections

A résumé does not only include your educational background and work experience. In fact, many employers look to see if applicants are involved in other opportunities on- or off-campus.

There are numerous types of experiences you can include on your resume. How you choose to sort and label them is really up to you and the job you are applying for. You could take your leadership experience and lump it under your catch-all experience section OR you can pull it out into its own section. If you do that, you can strategically move it to the space above your regular experience section and then employers will see your leadership roles first. You have the freedom to play with the order of your experiences if you sort them into various categories.

You can choose whether to include bullet statements for activities or not depending on your level of involvement and the relevancy to the job. In an honors section, there are typically no bullet statements at all, just a list of the honors the student has earned. Just like your experience section, any additional sections you include should consist of 4 pieces of information: the name of the organization, its location (city/state), your role or title, and the dates you were employed or involved.

Skills Section

One final section you will want to include on your résumé is the skills section. The skills section goes at the bottom of your résumé and lists the specific, quantifiable, testable skills you have that will make you stand out from other people. Do not list soft skills in this section such as leadership, communication, or teamwork. Instead, your soft skills should be demonstrated through your bullet statements. The skills section should highlight skills such as languages and computer skills.

If you have certifications such as CPR or any licenses to operate special equipment, you can name this section ‘Skills and Certifications’ and list all of them under the same header.

Additional Section Titles

  • Relevant Experience
  • Leadership Experience
  • Additional Experience
  • Activities
  • Volunteer Experience
  • Military Experience 
  • Research Experience
  • Honors
  • International Experience
  • Tutoring Experience
  • Shadowing Experience
  • Skills