Resume - Education History

Besides the Objective / Summary / Skills / Achievements section, what else is there to put on a resume? Well, you would typically provide your education history and work history.

Your education can be listed either before or after your work history, but I would recommend you put it afterwards unless you attended a stellar school. Of course, the definition of ‘stellar’ may depend upon your particular field. And if for whatever reason you do not want to emphasize your education, you’d definitely put it towards the end of your resume.

You do not need to provide too much detail about your educational history. Generally, you should provide the following:

• Institution name
• Location, if necessary to clear up confusion (e.g., UC-Irvine, Miami University of Ohio, etc.)
• Degree & Major
• Year of graduation
• Graduation honors, if any.
• GPA , but only if you’re a new graduate and your GPA is above 3.0 on a 4.0 scale.

Here are a couple of examples:

University of Nevada, Las Vegas
B.S., Computer Science, 2006
GPA: 3.3

University of California, Los Angeles
B.S., Computer Science, 2001
Summa cum Laude

And here is an unnecessarily detailed example:

State University of New York
Binghamton, New York
Bachelor of Science with Minor in IT Management
Additional coursework in Accounting and Finance
May 1996
GPA: 3.3 / 4.0

Remember, the resume screeners will only spend between 15 and 30 seconds scanning your resume. You want to convey the important information about your education, but you don’t want to clutter up that section and cause the readers’ eyes to drag.