Chronological Resume Format: Free Templates and Guide

What is a Chronological Resume?

A chronological resume is one of the three main resume formats (chronological, functional and combination). This resume format draws attention to your work experience and career advancements. In the chronological format, also called the reverse-chronological format, your current job or most recent position is listed first, and it continues in reverse-chronological order through the rest of your work history.

Chronological resumes follow the same standard layout:

1. Contact information

This resume section sits at the top of your document. Include your full name and professional email, phone number and relevant links to professional sites. These links can include social media sites such as LinkedIn or professional websites that host your work portfolio, resume and references.

2. Summary statement/career objective

This brief introduction sits near the top of your resume and helps you contextualize it with the requirements of an open job. This is the first place where you can connect personally with a hiring manager and showcase how your professional achievements will benefit the hiring company.

3. Work history

This is the main event of a chronological resume. This section traces back through your professional career, starting with your most recent job and working its way back. You’ll want to add quantifiable metrics and personal achievements in this section to make it truly shine. We’ll share a few pointers later on.

4. Skills

This section lets you build on additional career strengths that you can bring to an open role. You shouldn’t showcase more than six to eight skills in this section; any more, and you risk cluttering your resume and drawing attention away from your work history section.

5. Education

The final section of this resume highlights your formal degrees and any job-relevant certificates or training programs that you’ve completed. We’ll offer additional advice on how to write and structure this section in the writing guide below.

How to Write a Chronological Resume

Now that you know that the chronological resume is the right option for you, here are instructions you can follow to write an effective and interview-winning chronological resume.

Chronological resumes follow the same standard layout:

1. Craft a strong summary statement.

The summary statement should concisely summarize your professional experience, skills and accomplishments. Here you should underline the key points in your work history and focus on your most relevant achievements.

Start with the number of years of work or internship experience, your area of expertise and your primary job duties. Then specify important facts and accomplishments with quantified information. Continue with objective skills and abilities that will be useful in your new position. Also include relevant awards, degrees or certificates you hold.

To have a better understanding of this section, let’s compare two professional profiles. Here is a bad example of a corporate real estate executive’s profile:

In the example above, its unclear what the executive’s specialty is. Of course, every company would like to hire someone “highly motivated,” but just using the phrase alone doesn’t show it’s true. The last sentence could also be improved by describing “ongoing professional development” in more detail.

Now let’s have a look at this great example:

Objective facts and measured statements are what make this second profile example better than the previous one. Quantifiable information in a summary has the following benefits:

2. Outline your work history.

This is the main component of your resume. It should list your professional experience in reverse-chronological order, meaning you start by listing your current or most recent job and work backward. Each work history entry needs to include your job title, company name, location of the company and dates of employment.

Recruiters will be looking for more than just a list of tasks and responsibilities, but rather concrete examples of accomplishments, relevant skills and qualifications and quantifiable achievements; for example:

Look at how this example of a work history excellently features the candidate’s top accomplishments.

3. Select your skills.

The skills section allows you to slip a few additional career strengths and qualifications into your chronological resume. You should only include six to eight skills that weren’t previously mentioned in your summary statement or work history.

Strike an even balance between soft skills (interpersonal skills such as communication, teamwork or collaboration) and hard skills (learned skills such as Microsoft Excel, computer skills or data analysis). Always make sure you reference the job ad to tailor the skills to the employer’s requirements, just as long as you actually possess those skills.

Check out the following example of a skills section, and browse our favorite resume-friendly skills for different jobs and industries.

Example for an accountant’s resume skills section:

4. Showcase your education.

A chronological document highlights your professional experience, so the education section will usually go at the end of your resume.

You should provide the name and location of your university, major, type of degree and year of graduation. You may include the GPA if you recently graduated and it is 3.5 or above.

Look at this education example below so you know how to format it:

5. List your contact information.

This section should include the essentials: your complete name, address, email and phone number. It is not necessary to write your full address. Just include your city and state.

Always use a professional email address, which should include your first and last name, but no nicknames or funny business.

Add a link to your professional website if you have one and to your LinkedIn profile.

Here’s a screenshot of a resume heading with the contact information:

6. Add custom sections.

If you want to include more information on your resume beyond what fits in the five main sections, you can absolutely do so by including customs sections. Think of the five resume sections as the skeleton of your document which you can fortify with added sections to highlight awards, academic honors, licenses or certifications or volunteer work.

Look at this example section to learn how to format a certifications section on a warehouse worker’s resume:

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