This article is intended to serve as a comprehensive guide to creating a resume for a fresh graduate. This post clearly articulates all the sections that are needed to be included in a standard resume. Each section is explained with examples. You can also find sample resumes at the end of this article. Please note that this article doesn’t cover anything related to formatting of a resume. Formatting of resume using Word shall be covered as a separate blog post in near future. Also resume formats vary from country to country. This format in particularly is the de facto standard followed by freshers in India. This article was written after extensively researching many resumes on the internet.
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Header
Header is the first section in your CV. Header consists of sub-sections: Full name, present address, mobile number and email address. There is no necessity to include the heading as “CV” or “Resume”. I have seen many student resumes that start with this unnecessary heading. When you forward a document by name “resume.doc” to a recruiter, it’s obviously understood that the document is a resume and not anything else. Writing “resume” as a heading, not only wastes space but also distracts attention of the recruiter scanning your resume.
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Full Name
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Present Address
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Mobile Number
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Email
As it appears in your 10th certificate/passport. There is absolutely no need to put your picture in the resume. Picture may be necessary for those jobs that require good looks such as air hostess or a model.
Where do you live NOW? Employers rarely post snail mail to your address. In any case, better to give the address where a post can easily reach you.
This is the second most important field in your resume. Be sure to give your updated mobile number. If you use multiple numbers, give the most actively used one. One number is sufficient.
This is the most important field in your resume. That’s because this is the most commonly used channel of communication by recruiters. Mention an active email id of yours which doesn’t bounce. Email address should sound professional. So, avoid informal email ids such as hunkydude@yahoo.co.in or imurluv@gmail.com
Example: PREM KUMAR 1-2-302,Vanaz corner, Pune. 9923071216 prem.kumar@gmail.com
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Career Objective
This section is optional but is typically seen in almost all the resumes in India. You may choose to copy paste an objective from your friends’ resume. No harm done. If you prefer an original objective, write it on your own. Objective statement of a typical Indian student would be usually boastful with lots of decorative language. So go with this trend and find a bombastic objective that adds glitter to your resume. You can write a brief sentence about your key technical skills, soft skills and name this section as Professional Summary instead of Career Objective. Such summary can help hiring managers to know about you in less than 5 seconds.
Example: CAREER OBJECTIVE: Always seeking innovative and challenging career in the professionally managed and dynamic organization, which provides the best opportunities for the development and greater responsibilities to contribute towards organization.
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Educational Qualification
List all your professional qualifications in reverse chronological order(latest degree mentioned first). Mention the institute name, degree name, affiliated university/board name, location, specialization, aggregate and time period. Avoid using table format for this section. Tables are hard to maintain in word, and they are not properly read by the automated job search engines such as Naukri.com . If you have distinction, make it point to mention it explicitly. It adds weight to your resume. You can mention 6 month diploma courses here such as “Diploma in VLSI” or “Diploma in Embedded Systems” etc,.
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Masters degree
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Bachelors degree
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PUC/12th/10+2
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SSC/10th/Matriculation
Mention this sub-section if you are a post-graduate. In case you have done a part-time masters degree such as part time MBA, you don’t have to mention the word “part-time” unless the job posting requires full time graduates only.
Add asterix * if you are currently pursuing the degree. Clearly mention the year of passing. Mention your aggregate in percentage. If your college follows GPA system, mention your GPA along with scale Ex. 6.4 on a scale of 10.0 . You don’t have to mention marks obtained in individual semesters. But this is a common trend among MCA graduates to mention semester-wise percentage in their resume, while B.Tech/B.E graduates usually don’t mention semester marks.
Be sure to mention the aggregate percentage you scored in 12th exams. Many companies insist to use figure as a criterion for screening.
Mention the aggregate, school name & board of education.
Example: EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATION: *B.Tech* (Electronics and Communication Engineering) with aggregate 7.8 CGPA(scale of 10.0) in 2006-2010 from Bharath University, Chennai. *12th with aggregate 74% from Chakdwipa high school (W.B.C.H.S.E) in 2006. *10th with aggregate 80% from Chakdwipa high school (W.B.B.S.E) in 2004.
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Technical Skills
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Software Skills
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Hardware Skills
If you are a bachelor of IT related courses such as CSE or MCA, this sub-section is extremely important. Make sure you mention all the programming languages, databases, software tools that you are proficient at. Non-IT engineers can mention software tools related to their branch of engineering such as CAD/CAM, Matlab software. You may mention knowledge of operating systems and other software such as Windows and Microsoft office if you know nothing in Software.
This sub-section applies to you if you belong to non-IT engineering branches of Electrical, Electronics, Telecom, Mechanical etc. Mention your hardware knowledge here.
Example: SOFTWARE SKILLS: Languages & Skills C, C++ Operating Systems Windows 9x/2000/XP Softwares Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excel HARDWARE SKILLS: *Assembling of PC *Networking & Troubleshooting PC
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Projects Undertaken
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Final year project
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Mini Projects
This section is quite important. Don’t write too less or too much info about your engineering/MCA project. Write the title of your project and brief description about it in two lines. Mention the technologies involved & tools used. Optionally mention your role in the project. This section serves as a good ice-breaker for interviewers. They start asking you questions about the project you did in the final year of study. They also ask about your role in the project. Remember that they are silently evaluating your communication skills while you are answering these questions in an interview.
This sub-section is optional. If you think that your mini projects are worth mentioning, you should include mini-projects. And also be sure that mini-projects that you included are relevant to the job profile that you are applying to. If not relevant, it would be better not to mention them.
Example: PROJECTS UNDERTAKEN: Project Title: Efficient Algorithm for Terrain Simplification for Fast Rendering Summary: Improves the state of the art in occlusion plane detection given terrain data. My implementation showed a user controlled drive-through of a complex scene with real-time rendering of 3 million polygons using a 16 node Beowulf cluster. A paper was published in Graphics Interface ’04.
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In plant training/Summer training/Internship
This sub-section may become your life saver. If properly used it may divert the attention of the recruiter away from your poor grades. A good company name can do the job. Write the title of training, 2 line brief description of what you learnt in the training.
Example: TRAININGS UNDERWENT: Summer Training at Bharath Sanchar Nigam Limited, India (June 2006, 4 weeks) on modern telecommunication switch systems.
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Fields of Interest
It makes no sense to mention irrelevant fields of interest here. So mention only those interests that are related to the job profile that you want to apply. Don’t mention too many fields of interests, limit it to 5. Be sure that you are mentioning only those fields that you are genuinely interested in and those fields you have decent proficiency in. Remember that you may be interviewed on the topics that you mentioned.
Example: FIELDS OF INTEREST: Digital Signal Processing & Embedded systems.
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Achievements/Awards
You can report a wide range of achievements from school awards to college awards to paper presentations to conference participation to marks in entrance tests such as CAT, MAT, GRE, TOEFL etc,. There are no rules for this section. Try not to cross 10 bullet points. A lot of people might find difficulty filling this section up. My advice to them would be to think creatively and come up with any measurable achievement that is significant. A very interesting achievement that I found in a fresher resume was “Aggregate percentage of nearly 80% for two consecutive semesters”. So think creatively and identify your achievements. You can mention successful completion of courses that you were trained at computer training institutes. If you have organized your college fest, feel free to write a mention about them. You can also add administrative roles that you played in college such as being the representative of your class or being the member of student body at college.
Example: ACHIEVEMENTS: *Best B.Tech project – 2004. Dept of Computer Science, Bharath University. *Scored 1150 in GRE test. *Won many prizes in quiz and elocution in College. *Served as joint secretary of student body.
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Extra curricular activities
Mention sports, social and other philanthropic activities here. NSS, NCC, NGOs etc. You can include all your leadship, volunteer, participation activities here. A common confusion among freshers is whether to include participations in Achievements sub-section or in the Extra curricular activities sub-section. My advice is to include participations in Extra curricular activities and to include participations that won prizes or awards in Achievements sub-section.
Example: EXTRA CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES: *Member of Red Cross society.
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Soft skills / Strengths
Mention your soft skills and strengths such as strong inter personal skills, communication skills, self motivated etc,. I recently saw a resume which read “Good at handling stage(anchoring)”. Cool idea. So identify such strenghts and mention them. You don’t have to mention your weaknesses. A resume is like an advertisement. Does an ad show weaknesses of a product?
Example: STRENGTHS: *Determined to learn with practical approach *Good communication skills *Enthusiastic and can produce results under deadline constraints
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Personal Details
Don’t get into too personal details such as ethnicity or religion or caste, unless the job has some reservations for specific castes.
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Father’s name Or Guardian’s name
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Date of Birth
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Sex
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Marital Status
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Nationality
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Languages Known
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Permanent Address
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Hobbies
This is a standard sub-section in India. I really wonder why father’s name is written in a resume. What do employers have got to do with our father’s name?!
This may be commonly required by all the government jobs as they have an age limit which should not be crossed.
It’s not difficult to identify gender from name in India(unless that name is strange or ambiguous such as Krishna, Kiran). As a policy, many companies have a fixed male to female ratio. They fall short of female employees many a time. So if you are a female, you have an added advantage of selection.
This is again one of the typical fields in an Indian resume. In my opinion recruiters give preference to bachelors over married owing to the reason that bachelors have more time to spare. Just kidding! An employer is unlikely to judge selection based on marital status, unless it directly affects the job in some way.
This is for the companies to make sure that they are not violating any rules of employment by employing a foreign national. Write “Indian” if you are from India. If you have a passport, make it a point to mention that you have it and also give your passport number. This helps the companies to smoothly conduct their background check formalities.
India is multi-cultural and multi-lingual country. Knowledge of multiple Indian languages is helpful for jobs such as counsellor etc., which involve communication with students or general public. Knowledge of foreign languages would definitely be a great plus , thought not mandatory. Especially useful for BPO, IT industries as there is a lot of relocation to foreign countries.
Be sure to mention proper address of your permanent residence. This is a formality for the employer organization to record your details for security reasons. You can safely avoid this field if your resume gets lengthy.
Mention your hobbies here. “Playing cricket and watching television” are two of the most common hobbies of Indian students. Try to mention some creative and unique hobbies such as Stamp collection or Coin collection instead of the most common ones. Having said that, don’t lie here. The HR manager may verify this by asking you questions related to your hobby.
Example: PERSONAL DETAILS: Father’s Name Arun Kumar Date of Birth 27-02-1988 Sex Male Marital Status Single Languages known English, Hindi, Bengali, Oriya and Tamil Permanent Address B 33/29, Lanka, Varanasi (UP) -221005 Hobbies Listening to music, drawing, playing cricket
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References
References are people who are willing to vouch for you, typically your professors/lecturers, or college staff who know you professionally(not personally). Mention no more than 2 references. You will have to mention full name, designation, organization, email id and phone number of each references. Address is optional, as it bloats the resume. You can avoid this section by simply mentioning a line “References shall be furnished upon request”. But I would strongly recommend you to mention references as it adds credibility to your resume.
Example: REFERENCES: *Prof. R. K. Ravindranath, Dept. of Computer Science, Bharath University, 9352888890, ravindranath.r@bharath.edu *Prof. Janaki Rajagopalan, Dept. of Computer Science, Bharath University, 9354532352, janaki.rajagopalan@bharath.edu
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Declaration
Include a sentence “I hereby declare that all the above facts are true to best of my knowledge”. This is a formality which has to be present in a fresher’s resume.
Example: DECLARATION I hereby declare that all the above facts are true to best of my knowledge
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Footer
This section is placed at the end of a resume. This comprises of sub-sections: name, signature, place & date.
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Name
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Signature
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Place
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Date
Write your full name here.
You will have to sign above your name(after taking the print out of resume), if you had included the declaration sentence about assuring correctness of details presented in your resume.
Write here the name of the place where you are currently residing. If you are in a remote town, better mention the name of the nearest city/town where you’d like to find employment. This is nothing but a silly formality.
Write the date as of the day you apply this resume to a job. The disadvantage of this field is that once you print a few copies of resume with a particular date, you can’t reuse the resume for later dates. This section is to only ensure the employer that this resume was updated recently. Strictly speaking this is not a mandatory section.
Example: Prem Kumar, 21 February, 2010 Pune
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Putting it all together
Download Sample Resumes
About the Author: Sridhar Jammalamadaka is a full time blogger who writes a career blog – Interview Mantra . You can get in touch with the author on twitter – @sriavr.