Sections

The ordering of sections depends on where you are in your journey to find a software engineering role.

If you’ve no technical work experience yet, you should structure your resume with sections in the following order:

• Heading
• Education
• Technical Projects
• Work Experience
• Extra-Curricular Leadership
• Technical Skills

The goal here is to highlight your technical projects, which serve to feature software you’ve built and your technical skills and accomplishments. It's also a good idea to combine Work Experience and Extra-Curricular Leadership into a single section.

If you do have technical work experience, you should structure your resume with sections in the following order:

• Heading
• Education
• Technical Work Experience
• Technical Projects
• Other Work Experience
• Extra-Curricular Leadership
• Technical Skills

The goal here is similar to the resume with no technical work experience, but because recruiters care a lot more about technical work experience than technical projects, at this point your goal is to highlight your technical work experience. This is why this section comes before your technical projects. That isn’t to say that your technical projects are unimportant, as they can be used for additional credibility to your skills or to diversify your resume from skills gained from your technical work experience. As with the resume for folks with no technical work experience, it's a good idea to combine Other Work Experience and Extra-Curricular Leadership into a single section.

The following sections will explain in detail each section of a software engineer’s resume and their goals. Note that while the examples are using snippets from the popular Jake’s Resume template, you should feel free to use any template provided in the Using a Resume Template section.