Professional Summary

Summarize your experience + skills, highlight your most impressive achievements, elaborate on your motivations, what you are looking for in your next job, or mention things which are not immediately obvious.

This section is optional and can be omitted if you do not have enough space.

Recommendations

✅ Summarize your background

Use this section to summarize your background and highlight unique points or specialized skills. Mention your number of years of experience and title, especially if your years of relevant experience is only part of your full working experience or you took breaks during your career.

✅ Tailor to the role

Align this section to the job that you are applying for, using the same keywords where relevant.

✅ Explain unconventional/unique situations

Some applicants might be in unconventional/unique situations, such as wanting to try a different technical domain, changing responsibilities (e.g. experienced manager wanting to do hands on coding again), changing jobs (bootcampers, semi-technical people wanting to go fully technical). Use the "Professional Summary" section in the resume to convey this as there are no other more suitable sections.

Common Mistakes

❌ Don't state your objective

Unless you're in an unconventional/unique situation, the objective is clear from the role you are applying to.

❌ Specializing in too many things

Software Engineer with over a decade of experience, specializing in cloud-based technologies, full stack development, machine learning, big data processing, and data visualization.

The above sounds really incredible but most of the time, that statement is an exaggeration and goes against the meaning of "specialization". These "specializations" cover 80% of the work in the software industry and is too varied for a specialization! Even if that's really the case, it will be hard to justify specializing in so many areas given the limited space on a resume.

When hiring for a role, companies don't need people to have so many "specializations" anyway. It'd be much better to tailor the specialization depending on the job posting.

Examples