How to Easily List Certifications on Your Resume (With Examples)

Meritoflo here, resume writer, job search strategist, and LinkedIn top voice, here to make your job search easier, because job searching shouldn't be this hard. On resumes, we know where to put our education. It's pretty straightforward. But where do we put certifications? We have a few options, and they're all really easy. So let's take a look at how to quickly and easily add certifications to your resume. So one of the first places that we can include our certifications is as acronyms after our name. Do you have a certification that is a commonly known acronym like CPA, CFA, PMP, CSM? And are you a member in good standing and permitted to use the acronym with your name? If the answer is yes to both of these, then you can easily list your certification acronyms after your name on your resume, like this, so that the reader can see immediately that you have these certifications. The next place where we can add our certifications is to our education section. So instead of just having education, we can consider opening this up to the education and certifications. And then we would just list our certifications underneath our, say, bachelor's degree or other degrees. When we include our certifications, we want to include the certification name, the certification acronym, the certifying body, as well as the date, the month and year when we were certified. Haven't earned the certification yet? No problem. Just make sure that you're clear that it's an in-progress certification by including anticipated certification and the date that you are projecting to complete the certification. If you've collected quite a few certifications over your career and they're still active and you're still a member in good standing and you have the resume space, you can consider creating a section dedicated to certifications. If you want to go with this option, at a minimum, you'll want to have two certifications in the list. There's really no point in creating a separate certifications list for just one certification. So the subheader would be certifications, and then you would just list the certifications as they were shown in the previous example. If you have some professional licenses that you need to share as well, you can consider expanding this list to the certifications and licenses and then list your licenses as well. And it's that easy to include your certifications on your resume.