A standard resume has five core sections, in this order: a contact header, a short summary, work experience listed newest first, skills, and education. Optional sections such as projects, certifications, awards, publications, or languages go underneath, and only if they add evidence a recruiter cannot get from the five above. The order is not a tradition to obey, it is a ranking: whichever section proves fastest that you can do this specific job belongs highest on the page, which is why students and career changers move education or projects above work experience.
The short answer
What are the main sections of a resume, and which one comes first?
The contact header comes first. It is not really a section, it is the strip at the top with your name, one phone number, one email address, your city, and a link to your portfolio or profile. A screener who cannot find your email in two seconds does not go looking for it, so this block sits above everything and stays out of the header and footer of the document, where some parsers never look.
Then, in order: a summary of three or four lines, your work experience newest first, a skills block, and education. That is the canonical resume, and for the majority of applicants it is the right one. It works because it matches what a recruiter is trained to look for and the order that applicant tracking software expects to find it in. Deviating from it has a cost, so deviate only when you have a reason.
Everything after those five is optional: projects and outcomes, certifications, awards, publications, languages, volunteering, speaking, patents, and an interests line. Optional does not mean decorative. Each of those sections is worth adding exactly when it carries evidence the five core sections cannot carry on their own. A certification that the job posting names is worth four lines. An interests line that says "reading, travelling, music" is worth zero.
Section by section
What actually goes in each of the five core sections
The failure mode is almost never a missing section. It is a section that is present but empty of anything a hiring manager can act on.
Top of page
Contact header
Name, one email, one phone number, city and country, and one link. Skip your full street address, your date of birth, and your marital status. Put the link that best proves your work, which for most people is a portfolio or a personal site rather than a social profile.
Section 1
Summary
Three or four lines naming what you do, the scale you do it at, and the one result you are proudest of. Write it last, after the rest of the resume exists, and rewrite it for each role. A summary that would fit any job is doing nothing for this one.
Section 2
Experience
Newest role first, then backwards. Each role gets a title, an employer, dates, and three to five bullets that start with a verb and end with a result. Describe outcomes, not duties. "Responsible for the onboarding flow" describes a job. "Rebuilt onboarding and cut sign-up drop-off, with the before and after in the bullet" shows a result.
Section 3
Skills
A short, grouped list of the concrete things you can be tested on: tools, languages, platforms, methods. Group them so the eye can scan. Leave out the soft skills and the self-ratings. Nobody has ever been hired because their resume claimed four out of five stars in teamwork.
Section 4
Education
Degree, institution, and the year you finished. Add coursework, a thesis, or a GPA only while you are a student or within about a year of graduating. Once you have real work behind you, education shrinks to two lines and drops to the bottom of the page.
Ordering
How to order your resume sections in four decisions
The order is a ranking of your evidence, so rank the evidence first and let the layout follow.
Ask what this specific job needs proof of
Read the posting and write down the one thing the hiring manager most needs to believe about you. Shipped production code. Managed a budget. Handled patients on a night shift. That single sentence decides your whole layout, and it changes between applications more often than people expect.
Put the section that proves it directly under the summary
For most people that is experience, and the default order stands. For a student it is often projects or education. For a career changer it is a projects and outcomes block that shows the new skill being used, because the old job titles argue against them. Whatever proves the point goes into the top third of page one, where a six second skim actually lands.
Keep experience in reverse-chronological order inside the section
Reordering the sections is fine. Reordering the jobs inside experience is not. Recruiters read the dates as a timeline, and a jumbled or undated one reads as a gap being hidden, whether or not there is one. Newest first, every time, with month and year on both ends.
Cut until every remaining heading has something under it worth reading
Aim for four to six sections. A resume with nine headings and two bullets under each of them is not thorough, it is a table of contents. If a section cannot hold two lines that would change a hiring decision, delete the section and give the space back to experience.
The optional list
Optional sections, and the moment each one is worth its space
Add these only against a trigger. Without the trigger, they are page furniture.
Add when
Projects and outcomes
You are early in your career, changing fields, or your best work happened outside a job title. This is the strongest optional section that exists, because it lets you show the skill in use instead of asserting it in a skills list.
Add when
Certifications
The posting names one, or the field is licensed. A nursing licence, a CPA, a security clearance, a cloud certification the job asks for by name. A certification nobody asked for belongs in a footnote, not a heading.
Add when
Publications, talks, patents
You are applying to a research, academic, or specialist role where the record is part of the job. Outside those, a link on your portfolio does the same work without eating a third of page two.
Add when
Languages
The role touches a market where the language matters, and you can state a real level. Give the level in a recognised scale or in plain words. "Conversational Spanish, fluent German" says more than a row of half-filled circles.
Add when
Awards and honours
The award is external, named, and recent enough to mean something. An industry award is evidence. An internal spot bonus from four employers ago is not.
Add when
Volunteering
It fills a gap, shows leadership you have not shown elsewhere, or is genuinely relevant to the employer. Otherwise it goes under interests, in one line, or nowhere at all.
The cut list
The sections to delete, and how to label the ones you keep
Delete the references line. "References available on request" is a line that tells a recruiter something they already assumed, and listing the referees themselves exposes their contact details to every company you apply to. Hold the names back and send them when someone asks, which will be late in the process, after an offer is close. The same goes for the objective. An objective describes what you want; a summary describes what you bring. Only the second one helps the person deciding whether to call you.
On photos, the answer depends entirely on where you are applying. In the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland and Australia, leave it off. Many employers there will not consider a resume with a photo for bias and compliance reasons, and image blocks are exactly the kind of element that parsers handle badly. In much of continental Europe, and in parts of Asia and the Middle East, a plain headshot is normal and its absence is noticed. Follow the local convention of the country you are applying in, not the country you are sitting in. Date of birth, marital status, and a national ID number follow the same rule, and outside the countries that expect them, they are risk without upside.
For the headings you keep, plain and conventional wins. Write "Experience", "Skills", "Education", "Projects", "Certifications". Do not get creative with "My Journey" or "What I Bring To The Table". Applicant tracking systems map your content to fields by recognising the ordinary names, and a recruiter skimming the page is pattern matching on exactly the same words. A clever heading costs you the match and buys you nothing. Bold the heading, keep it on its own line, and never build the structure out of a table or a text box, because a two column table often comes back out of a parser as one interleaved mess.
Doing it
Reordering sections in Folio, a word processor, and a template builder
The advice above is easy to give and annoying to execute, because the moment you move a block in a document, the spacing breaks. Here is how the three common ways of building a resume actually behave.
| Capability | Folio | Word or Google Docs | Typical online builder |
|---|---|---|---|
| Change the section order | Set the order once. The PDF, the DOCX, and the web version all render in the order you chose. | Cut and paste the block, then repair the spacing, the page breaks, and the widowed heading by hand. | Usually supported, though the layout can shift and the fix is manual. |
| Hide a section you do not want | Toggle it off. It disappears from every export without you deleting the content, so you can bring it back for the next application. | Delete it and lose the content, or keep a second copy of the file and hope you edit the right one. | Often possible, sometimes only by emptying the fields. |
| Add a section the template did not ship with | Custom sections take your own title and your own bullets, so Publications, Speaking, or Clinical Rotations sit alongside the standard ones. | Free-form, which is the upside and the whole problem. Nothing stops you formatting it in a way a parser cannot read. | Varies. Fixed templates frequently allow no extra headings at all. |
| Know what your section choices did to the ATS read | A deterministic score out of 100 updates as you edit. Standard headings are worth 18 points and pay out in full at four or more populated sections. | No feedback of any kind. You find out when nobody replies. | Many show a score, then ask for a paid plan before you can download the file it scored. |
| Download the finished PDF or DOCX | Free, with no watermark and no paywall at the download button. Every layout and preset is available on the free plan. | Free, and the file is yours. | The export is where the paid plan usually starts. |
Being straight about the free plan: exports are genuinely free, but Folio Free gives you a portfolio.wrxstack.com address rather than your own domain, shows a small "Made with Folio" credit, includes 10 AI drafting generations a month, and limits you to the core designs. The resume layouts are not part of that limit.
The numbers behind the score
What Folio checks before it lets you export
The score is native to Folio and deterministic, computed from your own layout and content with no external model involved. The same resume always produces the same number, and every point is traceable to a rule you can read.
Frequently asked questions
What order should resume sections be in?
Contact header, summary, experience, skills, education, then any optional sections underneath. Hold that order unless a specific job gives you a reason to break it. The one rule that never bends is inside the experience section itself, where roles run newest to oldest so the dates form a clean timeline. If your strongest proof is a project rather than a job title, promote the projects block to sit directly beneath the summary and push experience down one slot.
How many sections should a resume have?
Four to six is the range that works, plus the contact strip at the top. Below four, a screener has nothing to hold on to and the page looks like a draft. Above seven, you are usually padding, and each new heading steals room from the experience bullets that are doing the persuading. Folio nudges you here as well: its scorer hands over the full standard-headings mark once four or more of your sections have real content in them.
Do I need a skills section on my resume?
Yes, for almost every role, and especially for anything technical or licensed. It is the one place where the exact nouns from the job posting can appear without contortion, and both the software and the human doing the first pass are looking for those nouns. Keep it to concrete, checkable things: tools, languages, platforms, methods. Drop the soft skills, drop the progress bars, and never claim a tool you would not want to be asked about in the interview.
Should a resume include references?
No. Leave the names off, and leave off the line that says references are available on request, because the employer already knows they can ask. Publishing your referees means their phone numbers travel to every company you apply to, which is not a thing they agreed to. Keep a separate one page list ready and hand it over when the conversation reaches the stage where someone actually wants to call them.
Should I include a photo on my resume?
It depends on the country you are applying in. Leave it off for the US, the UK, Canada, Ireland and Australia, where many employers discard resumes with photos to keep their hiring defensible, and where the image itself can confuse a parser. Include a plain headshot in much of continental Europe and in several Asian and Middle Eastern markets, where its absence looks odd. Match the local norm of the employer, not your own.
Should my resume be in chronological order?
Reverse chronological, yes. List the newest role at the top and work backwards, with a month and a year at both ends of each one. Recruiters read those dates as a story, and a shuffled or undated history reads as a gap you are covering up even when you are not. Reordering the sections is a legitimate tactic. Reordering the jobs inside the experience section is not.