Resume Sections: Education, Experience, and Skills

1. EDUCATION
Useful section for recent graduates and those with up to 15 years of experience. Less crucial for those over 40. Generally, the more professional experience you have, the less important the education section becomes.

Degrees
Think cumulative! If you have a Master's degree, it's not necessary to specify your Bachelor's or undergraduate degrees. If your intermediate degrees are different from your final degree, then detail them.
If you have a Bachelor's degree, it's not necessary to indicate that you have a high school diploma.
If the name of your degree is an abbreviation, write it out in full as the recruiter may not know it.

Also indicate if you have followed a VAE (Validation des Acquis de l'Expérience), used your DIF rights (individual training rights) or followed a CIF (individual training leave), in relation to the position you are aiming for! This shows your dynamism and your ability to invest in your future!

Internships
Should only be included on a resume at the beginning of your career and, in this case, are integrated into the professional experience section, without the word "internship" appearing: just because you weren't paid like a 'standard' employee doesn't mean your internship wasn't a full professional experience!

2. PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

For up to fifteen years of professional experience, create an 'experience-based' resume, detailing your experiences position by position, in reverse chronological order, as follows:

Start and end dates

Year/year or month year/month year (the day is superfluous)
If current position: "since…" or "from… to present"

Company name

Specify its activity - its turnover - the number of employees.

Job title

Your title - the department - the department's size
Example: Marketing Manager (4 people)

Job description

Responsibilities, role, tasks

Results obtained

Only quantified results are generally convincing

If you have more than fifteen years of professional experience, create a 'skills-based' resume,first explaining the main skills that characterize you and that you have demonstrated throughout your career, before detailing your professional experiences position by position over the last 10/15 years. For older experiences, the dates, employer's name and job title are sufficient and do not need to be detailed, unless they correspond to the professional field in which you are looking for work.

3. IT SKILLS

Are you an IT professional? Show that you know the subject, without writing a novel.List your skills and only indicate those that match the position you are applying for. Long lists of skills are not always pleasant to read, and even less so when the skills indicated are not useful for the position to be filled…

Are you not an IT professional? Specify if you can work on a PC and/or Mac, as well as the software you know how to use (spreadsheet, word processing, accounting software…). For well-known software, only mention their name. For others, very specialized, such as accounting, sales administration or HR management software, specify their purpose. For communication/marketing positions, indicate if you have any graphic design skills, if you know how to use content publishing tools for the most well-known blog platforms, or if you are a Twitter or corporate Facebook expert. This can be a plus for a company that wants to speak effectively using Web 2.0 tools…

4. LANGUAGE SKILLS

More important for some positions than for others, they should always be indicated! Because it remains difficult to evaluate one's own level of proficiency in a language, Monster now offers all candidates the possibility of knowing their English level free of charge and precisely thanks to a partnership with YES - Your English Solution.
In the meantime, don't promise recruiters a 'bilingual English' level if you only understand every other sentence… To tell the genuine from the false, some recruiters don't hesitate to remind the candidate that they wish to receive in an interview that the latter will be conducted in the language of Shakespeare. You would be quite embarrassed to have promised the moon…

To summarize, there are 4 language levels:

Bilingual:Because you have lived long enough in a country (English-speaking for example), or because your mother or father only spoke to you in English, you never ask your interlocutor to repeat their sentence, whether they have a Scottish accent or not! You are able to understand the technical explanations of a Manchester construction worker as well as a City executive.

Fluent:You don't need sentences to be repeated to understand them, but you still ask what certain terms mean that don't belong to the register of common language (formal language, slang…)

Reading, writing, speaking:You can understand and use familiar and everyday expressions as well as very simple statements to satisfy concrete and immediate needs. You can respond to topics that are very familiar to you.

School level:You know how to construct a sentence to make yourself understood, but it is rarely grammatically correct. You lack vocabulary and ask your interlocutor to repeat their words almost systematically. Despite this, you only understand them once in two…

Published December 28, 2010

Posted online January 3, 2011

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