Resume Part 1: The PROVEN resume format for transitioning military veterans

“So many formats to choose from!”

When first starting on your resume, the hard part can be deciding what format to use. There are an innumerable amount of formats to choose from, and everyone has an opinion on which one to use. Here we are going to break it down very simple and straight forward so we can cut through the bullshit and get to the important part and actually start writing your resume.

“Vet Coach recommended resume format…yes that’s my resume.

We recommend 9 key sections to best convey the most important professional aspects of “you” to the reader.

1. Header
2. Professional Summary
3. Key Skills
4. Professional Experience
5. Volunteer Experience
6. Education
7. Certifications
8. Technical Skills
9. Additional Information

We’ll cover each one of these sections in their own individual posts. But, for now we will provide a brief overview of each section to understand it’s importance. Header: This is where you’ll list your name and key contact information for yourself. Simple and straightforward. Professional Summary: This section is where you talk about what you’re good at and what you want to do. Do not use this section to talk about what you’ve done, that’s what the “Professional Experience” section is for. More on how to do this in the blog post on how to write your professional summary. Key Skills: Here is where you will list out your top 9-12 skills.  Keep these unique and explainable. Stay away from bland, meaningless words like “Leadership” or “Manager.” We have a pro tip on how to make your resume stand out with which key skills to use. Check out our post on this section to learn more. Professional Experience: This is the meat of your resume and the section where you will spend the majority of your time working on. Much more on this in a later post. Volunteer Experience: This section is optional, especially if you don’t have any volunteer experience. However, coming from the military, I suspect you do. Education: List all your degrees here. You can also list degrees you are actively working on with a prospective graduation date. Certifications: You can list professional certifications here. Do not list the 86 courses and “qualifications” you earned on active duty. List the ones that are real skills that an employer would care about. More on this in a later post. Technical Skills: This section is where you list any computer or technical related skills you have. A basic one to list would be Microsoft Office. These don’t have to be certifications, but just skills you have picked up that, again, an employer would value. Additional Information: This is a bit of a unique section, but one I highly recommend. After reading all the way through your resume, here is where you have 2-3 lines to humanize yourself. You can list professional accomplishments, personal accomplishments, or other things you’re proud of you want the reader to know. Here is where I list the medals I earned on active duty. So, that’s the basics of it. There will be a separate article written on each section to further explain how to write each one. And again, there’s an infinite ways to write or format a resume. However, this is merely a starting point. You’ll have plenty of time to change the format if you end up liking something different. This was not the format I first started with, this was after hours and hours of phone calls, edit sessions, mentor calls, and more. What I’m doing by showing you this format and guiding you through this process is so you can benefit from all the mistakes I made early on. We need to make sure we aren’t dwelling on the resume too long, and get to the important task of prepping for and landing interviews. Start with this format, you can always come back and change it up. Thanks so much again for reading. Stay tuned for a detailed post on each section!