Reverse-chronological. Contact details, summary, work experience newest first, skills, education, extras. Each role carries employer, job title, city and state, and month and year dates. This is the order applicant tracking systems were designed to read and the order most US recruiters skim, so it is the safe default whenever your last job resembles the one you are applying for. It works hardest when your recent titles are close to the target title. Use it unless you have a specific reason not to - and "my last job was boring" is not a reason, because the fix is better bullets, not a different order. If you were promoted inside one employer, stack the titles under a single employer heading with separate date ranges so the parser does not read it as job-hopping.
Education first. Contact details, short summary or objective, education, then any internships, part-time work, labs, clinical placements or coursework projects, then skills. Use it while you are studying and for roughly the first year after you finish, or whenever the degree itself is the qualification being screened for - a nursing programme, an engineering degree, a teaching credential. Put the degree, institution, city and state, and graduation month and year. Relevant coursework, a capstone project, a GPA you are happy with, and honours can sit under the entry. Once you have a year of full-time work in the field, move education back down to the bottom and let the job do the talking.
Licence and certification first. Contact details, summary, then a tight credentials block, then experience. In regulated work the first screen is binary: do you hold the licence, is it current, and is it valid in this state? Give the credential name, the issuing body, the state or jurisdiction where it applies, and the expiry month and year - an RN licence with its compact status, a CDL Class A with endorsements, a CPA licence, an EPA 608 card, CompTIA Security+, a PMP, a state contractor's licence. Licensing rules differ by state and by country, so list what you actually hold and where, rather than implying portability you have not checked. Keep the block to four or five lines and move the rest of your certificates to a section near the bottom.
Skills-forward hybrid. Contact details, summary, a short block of six to twelve skills or a three-line "areas of strength" group, then full dated work experience, then education. This is the honest version of a functional resume: it leads with capability but keeps every role, title and date exactly where a parser expects them. It is the right choice when your job titles do not say what you can do - a retail manager moving into logistics, a teacher moving into instructional design, a parent coming back after three years out. The risk is a skills list that nothing underneath supports, so pick the skills you can point to in a bullet and cut the rest.
Projects or portfolio first. Contact details, summary, a technical skills block, two to four projects, then employment history, then education. Use it when the work you want is judged on what you have built: software, data analysis, UX, research, video, or a trade portfolio. Each project needs a name, the tools used, your role if it was a team effort, and an outcome. Link the repository or portfolio as plain text so it survives parsing.
Weak vs strong project bullet
Weak: Responsible for building a reporting dashboard in Python.
Strong: Built a Python and Streamlit dashboard pulling 12 months of sales data from a PostgreSQL database, cutting a 3-hour weekly reporting task to 20 minutes.
Functional. Contact details, summary, then skill groupings with achievements underneath, and employment reduced to a bare list - sometimes with no dates at all. It solves one problem and creates several. Parsers often cannot connect an achievement to an employer or a time period, so the structured data the employer's system stores about you comes back half empty. Recruiters who read a lot of resumes recognise the format and go looking for what it is hiding. If you have a long gap, a dated hybrid with one honest line explaining the break usually lands better than a format that removes time from the page.
One caveat across all six: US federal government applications and academic positions do not follow these conventions. Federal resumes run longer and ask for details - hours per week, supervisor contacts, series and grade - that a private-sector resume would never include. Academic CVs put education first permanently and add publications, grants and teaching. Check the posting, because the agency or institution sets the format, not you.
