It’s a great time of year to draft or update your resume. In the tech world, depending on the role you’re applying to, you will be crafting a resume that looks a little different than other industries. Here’s an overview of what a tech resume includes.
Resume Sections
Like other resumes, you will have an education section and a work (or related) experience section. You may also have other common sections like activities, campus involvement, skills, or research.
Here’s where things differ: skills section and projects section.
Skills Section will have categories to highlight your different types of tech skills in addition to non-tech skills. These categories may be programming languages, software, databases, visualization tools, hardware, etc. You can choose the appropriate categories based on your skills and experience. Don’t forget to list your skills in order from most proficient to least proficient (no need to list qualifiers like “familiar” or “experience with” or “novice”).
Projects Section will show off your use of technical skills outside of the classroom through hackathons, data challenges, and personal projects of interest. You will want to give your project a title, share the type of project (e.g., group project, personal project), and use bullet point formatting to describe your work and the tech skills you’ve used.
The examples to the right can be found in a completed resume example in the Resume Guide.
Order of Things
The order of your resume will also look a bit different from other industries. Below is the order of sections commonly used on a tech resume (keep in mind, not all of these sections may apply to your experience or the story you want to share on your resume).
- Header (Name, Contact Information, Github if you have one)
- Education
- Skills
- Projects
- Related Experience (aka, work experience)
- Campus Involvement and Leadership
Considerations
Your class year/level will impact the length, sections, and technical experiences you can list. For example, a first-year student or sophomore may still list experiences from high school while a graduate student may include research, presentations, and publications specific to their area of study.
The job description will also impact the story you tell. Use strong action verbs that align with the skills, requirements, and key words noted in the job posting. Do not ignore this part of the process as it can make the difference between no call back and a phone screen.
The job location also matters. If you’re applying to a company in the USA, the resume example below is a pretty solid start. If you’re applying to a company in another country, be mindful of resume/cv specifics in those areas (e.g., headshots or birthdates may be common practice). Use Interstride to help guide you.
Disclosing information about yourself may be important at different aspects of the job/internship search process. The primary disclosure that may come from a resume is a name change. For example, if you go by a name that is different from your legal name. You may use your name on your resume but for legal documents (like applications, background checks, etc.) your legal name will be required. Anticipating questions about items that are on your resume like a name change, a low grade/GPA, pivot in major/area of study, or time away will give you the chance to craft a confident, assured response that only shares what you are comfortable sharing.
Example Tech Resume
This example resume is a general starting point and serves as a guide. This is not a definitive, comprehensive list of sections or experiences.
You can find more example resumes in our Resume Guide.
