There are two different ways to structure a resume:
- Chronological
- Project-Based
A chronological resume focuses on the places you've worked. Right after your Summary of Qualifications, you include a reverse-chronological list of places you've worked, including your job title, summary of your work, and some bullet points with key tasks and outcomes.
Job Title, Company Name, Start Date - End Date
One or two sentence summary of the role at a high level.
- Import thing you did
- Another important thing you did
- One more important thing you did
A project-based resume focuses on things you've done. Rather than immediately listing your work history, you instead provide a list of key projects you've worked on, including what you did, the problems you solved, and the impact of those projects. You can structure them just like work history, but the project, not the place, becomes the focus.
Project Name, demo-url.com
One or two sentence summary of the project.
- A key metric or feature
- Another key metric or feature
- One more key metric or feature
A chronological resume is what most folks think of as a traditional resume.
It works great when you've got at least a few years of experience in the industry, and even better if you've worked at companies that have name recognition.
A project-based resume is less common.
But, it can be a really good choice when you have little (or no) industry experience yet. It lets you demonstrate your skills by featuring projects (learning projects, open source projects, pro bono work, and so on) before you've done much formal work yet.
You can still list employers, but you do it in a shortened format after your projects: typically just the company name, job title, and years of employment.
WORK EXPERIENCE
- Job Title 1, Company, Start Date – End Date
- Job Title 2, Company, Start Date – End Date
- Job Title 3, Company, Start Date – End Date
This resume structure is a great choice when you don't have much experience, but it's also a good fit when you have a lot of experience at a small number of employers or have worked primarily as a freelancer or in an agency.