What to put on a resume, section by section

The core structure of a resume is fairly settled: contact information, experience, education, and skills, in some order depending on your background. The harder question is what belongs inside each section and what quietly does not.

Contact information

Name, email, phone number (optional in many markets now), a location (city and country is usually enough; a full address is not needed), and one or two relevant links, such as a LinkedIn profile or, for developers, a GitHub username. Skip a second email you rarely check and any social link that is not directly relevant to the job.

A summary, if you use one

A two- or three-line summary at the top is optional, and it is only worth including if it says something specific: years of experience, a domain, a notable achievement. “Hardworking professional seeking new opportunities” says nothing an employer could not assume by default, and a resume is better off spending that space on your first real bullet point instead.

Experience

List roles in reverse chronological order: title, company, dates, location. Under each, three to five bullets describing what you did and, ideally, what changed as a result. Lead with the outcome where you have one. Cut roles that are old, unrelated to the job you want, and offer nothing a reader would care about; a resume does not need to be a complete employment record.

Education

Degree, institution, and graduation year. Once you have several years of relevant work experience, education moves down the page and shrinks to one or two lines; it stops being the strongest evidence about you once your work history exists to make that case instead. Early in a career, when a degree may be the most concrete credential available, it is reasonable to keep it near the top with more detail, including relevant coursework or a GPA if it is strong.

Skills

A short, categorized list of tools and languages you have genuinely used, not everything you have ever opened. Covered in more depth in what skills to put on your resume.

Projects, for developers and anyone without a long work history

If your job history is thin, whether because you are early-career, changing fields, or self-taught, a Projects section carries real weight. Structure it the same way as Experience: a name, the technologies used, and a line or two on what it does and what problem it solved.

What usually should not be there

A photo, in most English-speaking hiring markets, since it introduces bias risk for the employer more often than it helps the candidate. References, or “references available on request,” since employers ask for them separately when they need them. Hobbies, unless one is directly and specifically relevant to the role. A full list of every certification, conference, and course you have ever attended, most of which belong on LinkedIn rather than a one-page document competing for space with your actual achievements.

Letting real activity fill in the harder sections

The Experience and Projects sections are usually the hardest to write well, because they require remembering and quantifying work from months or years ago. For developers, a GitHub profile already has much of that history recorded automatically. resumefromgit.com reads a public username and fills in repositories, languages, and contribution activity directly, which turns those sections from a memory exercise into a starting draft grounded in what you have actually shipped.