Resume sections: what to include, what to call them, and what order to put them in

What we found in 218 real resumes

Every resume submitted to the ResumeAtlas ATS checker between June 2026 – September 2026 with usable text, de-duplicated to 218 distinct documents, run through the checker’s heading pass. The pass reads each short standalone line, compares it to a list of standard section wordings, and records the first match per section — the same thing a parser does before it can put your jobs into a work-history field. A resume counts as having a section only when its heading matched.

Which sections real resumes have (under a heading a parser maps)

n = 218. “Other wording” is a heading the pass matched by a keyword (a line containing “certificate” or “project”) rather than by a standard phrase; it is not published word for word. 16.5% of the 218 resumes did not parse into a usable record at all, and they count as having no sections here.

Read the top three rows as a warning rather than a census. Roughly one resume in four (20% for Experience, 23% for Skills, 20% for Education) had no heading the parser could map for a section that almost every resume has. Some of those resumes genuinely lack the section (a student with no jobs yet), some lost the heading in extraction (a sidebar, a table, letter-spacing), and some used a wording that is not on any standard list. The next two tables separate those cases.

What people call each section

Among resumes where the section was recognised, the wording that matched. The spread is narrow: the top three phrasings cover more than nine in ten Experience headings, and “Education” is the only word anyone uses for education.

What order real resumes use

• First section after the header: Summary 79.5%, Experience 9%, Skills 7.5%, Education 2%, Projects 1%, Certifications 1% (n = 200 resumes with two or more recognised sections).
• Summary above Experience: 98.6% of the 147 resumes that have both.
• Skills above Experience: 65.8% of 149. The skills-first layout is the majority, not the exception.
• Education above Experience: 15.3% of 150 — the student and recent-graduate pattern.

The headings a parser has no field for

Short standalone lines made only of ordinary heading words that matched no standard section, seen in at least 3 different resumes. These are not exotic: they are the sections people add on top of the standard five, and a parser simply files their content nowhere in particular.

14.2% of the 218 resumes carried an unrecognised heading that reads like a core section (skills, experience, education or summary) while that section was also missing — the case where the wording, not the content, cost the section. The analyzer’s synonym list was extended after this scan with the wordings it flagged in three or more resumes (“career objective”, “internships”, “technical expertise”, “professional skills”); the figures on this page are from the current list.

What sections should a resume have?

Five, and they are the same five on nearly every resume that works: a header with your contact details, a summary, a skills list, your experience, and your education. Two optional sections earn their place often enough to treat as standard when you have the content — certifications and projects. The table gives the section, the headings that are safe to use for it, and what goes under it.

Two of these sections have their own guides: how to write the summary (with the measured length of real ones) and what to put in the skills section. For the experience section, the thing that separates a strong resume from an average one is not the heading but whether the bullets carry a number — most do not.

How many sections should a resume have?

Four to six. The median resume we measured had 4 sections a parser could name, and the resumes with fewer than three were almost always ones where a section existed but sat under a heading nobody recognises. Above seven, you are usually splitting one section into several (“Technical Skills”, “Soft Skills”, “Tools”, “Languages”) and each small box is read as loose text.

Which resume sections are optional?

Summary, certifications, projects, languages, volunteering, publications, awards, interests. Add one when it answers something the posting asks for and drop it when it does not. The one exception is candidates with no work experience yet: projects and internships are not optional for you — they are your experience section, and they deserve a standard heading (“Projects”, “Internship Experience”) rather than being tucked under education.

What order should resume sections be in?

Header, summary, skills, experience, education, then optional sections. That is the order the data says most people already use (79.5% lead with a summary; 65.8% put skills above experience) and it is the order a reader expects: who you are, what you can do, where you did it, what you studied.

• Skills above or below experience? Above, in one short block, when the posting is tool-driven (most technical roles) so the match is visible in the first screen. Below when your titles carry more weight than your tool list (management, senior leadership).
• Education above experience? Only while it is your strongest, most recent credential — students, new graduates, and anyone whose degree is the qualification the job actually requires. 15.3% of the resumes we measured did this.
• Where do certifications go? Directly under education when there are one or two; as their own section above education when the credential is the thing the posting requires (cloud, security, project management, clinical roles).
• Does the order matter to an ATS? Not for parsing — a parser finds sections by heading, not by position. It matters to the person reading the parsed record or the PDF, who reads top-down and stops early.

Order is one of the three things that distinguish the chronological, functional and combination formats; for almost everyone the reverse-chronological experience section, in the order above, is the right call.

What should you call each section? (resume headings)

The plainest word. A parser matches your heading against a short list of standard phrasings and files everything under it into that field; a heading that is not on the list leaves the content as loose text. The list below is the wording that both readers and parsers recognise without effort.

Two formatting rules matter more than the wording. First, a heading must be a line of its own, in the body of the page: a heading inside a sidebar, a table cell or a text box can leave the file in a different place from its content. Second, no letter-spacing: a template that tracks headings out to “E X P E R I E N C E” writes exactly those spaced letters into the file, and in our test that alone broke heading detection in most extractors. Bold, capitals, a rule underneath, a colour — all fine.

If you want to see which of your headings a parser actually maps, the ResumeAtlas ATS checker reports “Sections found” for your own file — the same measurement as the table above, free and without signup.

The header: contact information

The header is the block at the top with your name, phone, email, city and one link (LinkedIn or a portfolio). It does not need a heading — your name is the heading, one or two sizes larger than anything else. Do not label it “Contact” or “Personal Details”; a parser finds these fields by pattern, so the label adds nothing (it was the single most common unmapped heading in our sample). What does matter is placement: in the 218 resumes we measured, the name was missed on 7.8% and the email on 5%, almost always because the contact block sat in the document header band or a sidebar rather than in the body of the page. Leave out your full street address, date of birth, photo and marital status unless the country you are applying in expects them.

Resume sections with no work experience

Same five, one substitution: education moves to the top, and projects or internships stand in for the experience section — under their own standard heading, formatted exactly like jobs (title, organisation, dates, bullets with a result). Add relevant coursework under education and a short skills list above it. Skip the summary if it would only restate that you are a student; write one if you have a specific target role. Resist the urge to invent sections (“Leadership”, “Extracurricular Activities”) to fill the page — that content reads better as bullets under a project or role.

How this was measured

• Sample. 322 resumes submitted to the ResumeAtlas checker with usable text, June 2026 – September 2026, de-duplicated to 218 distinct documents. Same corpus as the ATS parsing benchmark.
• Method. The checker’s heading pass: each line of 48 characters or fewer that does not end in a full stop is normalised and compared to the standard-wording list for each section; the first match per section is recorded with the wording that matched and its position. Order figures use those positions. Unrecognised headings are lines of one to four words made entirely of ordinary heading vocabulary that matched no section; a wording is published only when it appears in at least 3 distinct resumes.
• Privacy. Aggregates only. Wording is reported from a fixed synonym list or the vocabulary filter; no resume text, name, employer or title is stored in the published data.

What this does not show

• Whether a section was genuinely absent or lost in extraction. The text is post-extraction, so a heading inside a sidebar that the extractor dropped counts the same as a heading that was never written. The parsing benchmark has the column and table rates.
• Any commercial ATS. This is the ResumeAtlas analyzer, which models the shared heading-matching stage; vendor lists differ at the margins.
• Hiring outcomes. Nothing here records whether a resume led to an interview.
• The sample skews toward software, data and engineering roles and covers signed-in users only.

Data generated 2026-09-20. The writer script is in the ResumeAtlas repository. Free to cite with attribution.

FAQ

Related: the longer answer on whether you need a summary, the experience section format, and a template that already uses these sections and headings.