CV section order and headings that ATS software recognises
Use plain, standard headings and put your strongest evidence first. Three ready-made orders for different situations.
Section order decides what a recruiter sees in the first few seconds, and section headings decide whether software files your information in the right place. Both have simple, dependable answers.
Use standard headings
Applicant tracking systems (ATS) split your CV into fields such as experience, education and skills. Most parsers find those fields by looking for familiar headings. A creative heading may be read correctly, but there is no benefit to taking the risk, and a human skimming the page also finds standard headings faster.
| Section | Safe headings | Avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Summary | Summary, Profile, Professional summary | About me, Who I am, My story |
| Experience | Experience, Work experience, Professional experience, Employment history | Where I’ve been, Career journey, What I’ve done |
| Education | Education, Education and qualifications | Learning, Academic background (usually fine, but less standard) |
| Skills | Skills, Technical skills, Key skills | Toolbox, Superpowers, What I bring |
| Projects | Projects, Selected projects | Things I’ve built |
| Certifications | Certifications, Licences and certifications | Badges, Credentials I hold |
| Languages | Languages | Tongues, Linguistic abilities |
| Volunteering | Volunteering, Volunteer experience | Giving back |
| Publications | Publications | Writing |
Use the spelling of your target market: “Licenses” in the US, “Licences” in the UK. Either is recognised.
The builder flags section headings an ATS may not recognise, and each region in CV Once starts with suitable defaults (for example “Work experience” and “Profile” for the UK, “Experience” and “Summary” for the US).
Watch out: Headings should be real text. Do not put them inside images, text boxes or page headers, and avoid replacing them with icons. Some parsers skip anything that is not in the main text flow. See ATS formatting pitfalls.
The principle behind section order
Put your strongest evidence for this job near the top. Readers skim from the top down and often decide whether to read further after the first third of page one. That is the whole rule; the orders below are just applications of it.
Order for experienced applicants
If you have two or more years of relevant work, your experience is the strongest evidence.
- Name and contact details
- Summary (two or three lines, optional)
- Experience
- Skills
- Education
- Certifications, languages, projects (as relevant)
- Volunteering or interests (optional)
Education moves down because your degree matters less than what you have done since. A senior applicant can reduce education to one line per qualification with no grades.
Order for graduates and students
With little relevant work experience, your qualification and what you did during it are the strongest evidence.
- Name and contact details
- Summary (optional, very short)
- Education, with relevant modules, final project or dissertation, and grade if good
- Projects (academic, personal or team projects that show job-relevant skills)
- Experience (internships, placements, part-time jobs)
- Skills
- Volunteering, societies, interests
If you have a substantial internship in the target field, it can move above projects or even above education. See the graduate CV guide.
Order for career changers
Your previous job titles may not match the role you want, so lead with what does.
- Name and contact details
- Summary that names the target role and the bridge between old and new (“Secondary maths teacher moving into data analysis; built and ran the school’s assessment tracking in SQL and Python”)
- Skills, grouped around the new role
- Projects or relevant training (where you have done the new kind of work)
- Experience, with bullets rewritten to show transferable results
- Education and certifications
Before: Experience: Teacher, 2016 to present. Taught maths to classes of 30 pupils.
After: Projects: Assessment dashboard. Built a Python and SQL pipeline that combined three spreadsheets of test scores for 640 pupils into one weekly report, now used by six departments.
The “after” puts relevant evidence before the reader meets the job title. See the career change CV guide, and the teacher to UX example.
Should you use a skills-first (functional) CV?
A functional CV groups everything by skill and hides or minimises the job history. Many recruiters distrust this format because it can look as though you are hiding gaps or short roles, and some ATS parse it poorly. A hybrid order (a strong skills section near the top, then a normal reverse-chronological experience section) gets most of the benefit without the suspicion.
Within each section: reverse chronological
List roles, qualifications and projects with the most recent first. The exception is a projects section, where you may order by relevance instead, putting the project that best matches the job first.
Optional sections: include only if they earn their space
- Certifications: include if the job ad mentions them or they are standard in your field. See certifications and languages.
- Languages: include if the role uses them, or if you are applying internationally.
- Volunteering: include if it shows relevant skills or fills a gap.
- Publications, talks, patents: include for research, academic and some technical roles.
- Interests: optional; see hobbies and references.
- References: usually leave out.
Section headings in other languages
If you are applying in another language, use that language’s standard headings: for example “Berufserfahrung”, “Ausbildung” and “Kenntnisse” in German, or “Expérience professionnelle”, “Formation” and “Compétences” in French. Mixed-language CVs are harder to parse and harder to read.
Next: the work experience section and how ATS software reads your CV.