Module 6: Experience, Projects, and Education — The Section-by-Section Resume Guide
Table of Contents
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Each section of your resume has specific rules about content, order, and depth. Knowing what to include — and what to leave out — in each section is as important as writing quality bullets.
This module takes about 12 minutes. After reading it, you’ll know exactly what to include in your Experience, Projects, and Education sections and how to handle the hard cases.
Experience Section
Order: Most Recent First, Always
Reverse chronological order is standard and expected. ATS systems are built around it. Recruiters expect it. Functional resumes (skills-first, no dates) score poorly in ATS and look like candidates are hiding something.
If you have a gap or a non-linear career path, handle it directly — don’t rearrange the section order to obscure it.
What to Include Per Role
For each position, include:
- Company name (bold)
- Your title (bold)
- Location — city/state or “Remote”
- Dates — month and year, start and end, consistent format
- 3–5 bullet points focused on accomplishments (from Module 4)
- Tech stack or tools — can be in a brief line below the title or woven into bullets
Acme Corp — Senior Software Engineer — Remote
Jan 2022 – Present
• Built real-time event pipeline processing 12M daily events, reducing processing latency from 8s to 400ms
• Led migration from monolith to microservices for 3 core services, enabling independent deployment cadences
• Mentored 4 junior engineers through career development plans; 2 promoted within 18 months
• Reduced on-call alert volume 62% by implementing structured runbooks and improving monitoring coverage
Stack: Go, Kafka, Kubernetes, AWS (ECS, RDS, CloudWatch), Terraform
How Many Roles to Include
Go back 10–15 years for experienced candidates. Roles older than 15 years rarely add value unless they’re uniquely relevant. A 2-line abbreviated entry is fine for old roles:
Early Career: QA Engineer at various startups (2004–2009)
Gaps in Employment
Do not leave unexplained gaps of 6+ months. A brief note is always better than silence.
Acceptable gap notes:
Career break — family caregiving, 2023–2024Independent consulting / freelance, 2022–2023Full-time bootcamp / credential program, 2021Sabbatical — travel and open-source contributions, 2020
The year-only trap: Some candidates use only years (2019–2021) to hide a short gap between roles. Recruiters know this trick and will ask. Use month-year throughout and address gaps head-on.
Contract, Freelance, and Consulting Work
List it. Contract work counts as professional experience.
If you have many short contracts, group them:
Independent Consultant — Software Engineering
Jan 2021 – Dec 2022
Clients included: Stripe (infrastructure audit), Notion (API scaling), two seed-stage startups
• Led infrastructure design for Stripe's internal tooling migration affecting 200+ engineers
• Defined API rate limiting strategy for Notion, reducing abuse incidents 40%
If each contract has enough material for its own entry, list them individually with the client name as the company and the body for accomplishments.
Projects Section
When Projects Matter Most
The projects section is the most underused part of a resume — especially for early-career candidates, career changers, and technical candidates.
Use it when:
- You’re applying to technical roles and want to demonstrate hands-on skills
- You’re early-career with limited professional experience
- You’re switching industries and want to show applied skills in the new domain
- The role requires a specific technology you haven’t used professionally but have built something with
For senior candidates with 10+ years, the projects section is usually optional unless the projects directly support the application (major open-source contributions, published tools with real usage).
Where to Put It
- New grad / entry-level: After Skills, before or after Education (above Experience if education is most relevant)
- Mid-level with relevant projects: After Experience
- Senior: Omit unless highly relevant
What to Include Per Project
For each project include:
- Project name — linked to GitHub or live URL if available
- 1–2 sentences: what it does and why it exists
- Technologies used
- Scale or outcome if measurable (users, stars, deployment status)
Example:
OpenBudget — github.com/yourname/openbudget Personal finance tracker built with React and a Go backend, deployed on Fly.io. ~200 active users since launch. Stack: React, Go, PostgreSQL, Plaid API, Fly.io
What to Skip
Tutorial projects — “Todo App,” “Weather App,” “Netflix Clone” — these signal learning, not genuine skill application. Replace them with something you built to solve a real problem.
Unfinished projects with empty repos. If the GitHub link goes to a repo with 2 commits and no README, leave it off.
Outdated tech stack. If the project is 7 years old and uses frameworks you no longer know, it won’t help in a technical screen.
Education Section
Where to Put It
The placement depends entirely on your career stage:
| Stage | Placement |
|---|---|
| Recent grad (0–3 years) | Above experience, right below summary |
| Early career (3–5 years) | Between experience and skills, or after |
| Experienced (5+ years) | Below experience — your work history is more important |
| Academic / PhD | Above experience with full publication/research section |
What to Include
- Degree — full name: “Bachelor of Science in Computer Science” (not “B.S. CS”)
- Major — and minor if relevant
- University name — full name, not abbreviation
- Graduation year — just the year is fine
- GPA — include only if 3.5 or above and within the last 5 years
- Relevant coursework — only if directly relevant and you lack professional experience in that area
- Honors / Dean’s List / leadership — include if substantive, recent, and not overloaded
Example:
University of Michigan — B.S. Computer Science, May 2022
GPA: 3.7 | Dean's List (6 semesters) | Teaching Assistant, Algorithms (2021–2022)
What to Skip
Once you have a college degree: drop high school entirely.
Once you’re past 5 years of experience: drop GPA unless it was exceptionally high and still relevant.
Don’t list the university’s street address.
Don’t include coursework that’s just the standard curriculum for your degree — “took data structures” isn’t a differentiator.
Section Order by Career Stage
| Career Stage | Recommended Order |
|---|---|
| New grad / Student | Contact → Summary → Education → Projects → Skills → Experience |
| Entry-level (0–2 yrs) | Contact → Summary → Skills → Education → Projects → Experience |
| Mid-level (2–5 yrs) | Contact → Summary → Experience → Skills → Projects → Education |
| Senior (5+ yrs) | Contact → Summary → Experience → Skills → Education |
| Career changer | Contact → Summary → Transferable Skills → Education → Experience |
| Academic / PhD | Contact → Summary → Education → Research → Publications → Experience |
The ATS Resume Improver detects your profile type automatically and recommends section ordering. Use that detection as a starting point, then adjust based on your specific situation.
Next Steps
You’ve built a complete, well-structured resume. The next module covers tailoring it to specific job descriptions — the step that moves an ATS score from 50% to 75%+.
→ Module 7: Tailoring Your Resume
Or return to the course hub: Resume Optimization Course Start
