How to list education on a résumé

Education is three facts and a decision about where to put them. Here is the order, the cases that need more, and what the check here reads as evidence.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— qualification, institution, years.

Education on a résumé is three facts: the qualification, the institution, and the years. Everything else is a judgement about how much room it deserves, and that depends almost entirely on how long ago you finished.

The order on the page

While you are studying, or in your first year or two of work, education goes above experience: it is the strongest evidence you have and the reader should meet it first. After that it moves below, and it keeps shrinking. Ten years in, one line per qualification is plenty.

What each entry holds

The qualification as it is actually called, the institution, the place if it is not obvious, and the years. "BSc Computer Science, Universität Leipzig, 2014 to 2018". Four-digit years, one format down the whole page. Shortened years cost eight points of parseability in the check here, and mixed date formats cost four more.

Grades, honours and modules

Include a grade while it is recent and strong. Include honours and prizes that a stranger can weigh. Modules belong on the page only while your degree is the main evidence, and there they earn their place by naming the tools and methods you can actually use. The coursework guide covers which modules are worth naming and which are filler.

Unfinished, interrupted or in progress

Write what is true. "Studied Mechanical Engineering, 2016 to 2018, two years completed" is a fact and reads as one. "In progress, expected 2027" is also a fact. The version that causes trouble is the entry whose dates simply stop, because a reader fills that silence with whatever occurs to them.

Qualifications from other countries

Give the original name first, then a local equivalent in brackets if you are confident of it. Add the institution and the country. Where an equivalence body has assessed your qualification, its wording is the safest wording to use. What you should never do is translate a qualification upwards; the original is checkable, and the check happens after an offer is made.

What the check looks for

The ATS résumé checker gives education fifteen points of the completeness dimension. It recognises the headings Education, Academic background, Academic qualifications, Qualifications, Studies and Education and training, and it looks under them for a degree word, an institution word, or a year with enough surrounding text to be meaningful. There is also a fallback: a named degree anywhere in the document, alongside an institution or a date, is accepted even if the heading is unusual.

That fallback exists so an unconventional layout is not punished twice. It is not a licence to skip the heading, because the parseability rules separately reward sections whose headings have real content beneath them.

In the builder

Education is its own section in the résumé builder, counted in the rail, with the qualification, institution and years as separate fields so the design can lay them out consistently. If you imported an old file, whatever it read is already there and the review page told you how many entries it found. Certifications and short courses have their own section under Add content, which keeps the education block clean.

Several qualifications, one block

List them newest first, like roles. Where you have a postgraduate qualification, the undergraduate one below it can lose its grade and its detail. Where you have three qualifications at the same level, keep the two that relate to the work and compress the third to a line. The block should shrink as your employment history grows, and the guide to how far back to go applies to education exactly as it does to work.

Professional training courses do not belong in this block. They sit with certifications, where a reader expects short, dated, issuer-backed items rather than degrees.

School qualifications

Keep them while they are your most recent qualification, and take them off as soon as a degree or two years of work exists. At that point they are using a line to tell a reader something they have already inferred. The exception is a country or a profession whose applications expect them, in which case one compressed line covers the lot: the qualification, the school and the year, with grades only where they are asked for.

Studying while you apply

Put the qualification in with its expected completion date, and say plainly where you are: modules completed, thesis submitted, examination booked. A reader can plan around a date; they cannot plan around an entry that is silent about when it ends.