How To Include Your Accomplishments On Your Resume (With Examples)

You’ve probably been told not to brag about yourself. Even though that’s usually good advice, throw it out the window when you start writing your resume.

Your resume is supposed to convince a hiring manager that you’re the best person for the job, so make sure you include all of your accomplishments that demonstrate why you really are the best.

You don’t need to get cocky or start stretching the truth, but it’s important that you don’t sell yourself short. Recruiters genuinely want to know what makes you great.

Accomplishments You Should Include in Your Resume

1. Honors and awards. The most obvious accomplishments you should include in your resume are the awards and honors you’ve received. If you’re a recent graduate, this might be graduating summa cum laude or receiving your department’s outstanding student award.

   In the professional world, this could be a promotion, an achievement award, or even recognition from your CEO at your last company meeting.

2. Reached or exceeded goals. If you met a personal goal to do something like increasing sales or speeding up a process’s completion time, include that on your resume.

   Or, if you exceeded a standardized target, mention that as well. For example, if your department’s standard quota is 50 sales per person per month and you made 100, that’s a resume-worthy accomplishment.

3. Certifications. If you earned a certification from a class or training, you could include that on your resume as well. Just make sure you’re only mentioning the ones that actually have something to do with your work:

   For example, employers usually don’t care if you’re an accountant and you got a welding certificate.

4. Problems you solved. If you came up with a creative solution for a problem, especially if you went above and beyond and did it without being asked, hiring managers want to know about it.

   Just make sure you focus on what you did and the results of your efforts and not on the person who caused the problem in the first place.

5. Improvements you made to the company. Along with your problem-solving skills, recruiters want to see that you’re willing to find ways to improve the organization actively.

   If you found a way to streamline recordkeeping, cut down errors, or improve a product, mention that in your resume.

6. Excellent work. Include any significant positive results of your work, even if they didn’t necessarily break any records. Employers want to see that you know what you’re doing and do it well, so mention anything you’d like to point out and say, “See? I did that.”

7. Volunteer work. Especially if you’re a recent graduate or have a short employment history, you should include any volunteer work you’ve done. Hiring managers like seeing this on a resume, as it shows that you aren’t afraid of hard work and are a well-rounded individual.

How would you list an achievement on a resume?

Don Pippin
Don Pippin Chief Talent Officer

Don’t make them hunt for the achievement. Draw their eyes to the very beginning of the sentence to keep them reading!

If you developed ad campaigns for clients, increasing sales by an average of 27%, I would lead with:

27% increase in average sales achieved by developing ad campaigns for clients.

This is also a good area to expand to include details from the job posting. This will help with keyword optimization. A great tip is to take the job posting and put it through a word cloud generator to see what words are used most often. Make sure those words are used in your resume, organically, and they make sense.

Accomplishments Not to Include in Your Resume

1. Fake or stretched achievements. You should never lie on any section of your resume, including when you’re talking about your accomplishments. Yes, make sure you communicate the full weight of what you did, but don’t stretch the truth in an attempt to make yourself look better.

   Recruiters know how to quickly find out if someone is lying, and it won’t go well for you if they do. Better to sound less impressive than to dig yourself into a hole that could damage your career.

2. Proprietary information. Never share industry secrets or any other sensitive company information on your resume.

   Even if you think it doesn’t matter if this particular company knows the information, chances are your future employer will want you to keep some things quiet for them too, and they won’t hire you if they see they can’t trust you.

3. Offensive or polarizing accomplishments. If you have any inkling that achievement could come across as offensive to anyone, leave it out. It isn’t worth driving a potential employer away for no good reason. Instead, keep your accomplishments professional and applicable.

4. Outdated achievements. Your resume should grow along with you, so if you’re four jobs into your career and still have your high school awards listed, it’s time to let those go. (If you’re just starting your career and need some filler, though, those can be beneficial.)

   The same goes for references to your years in college or your first few jobs once you have some more experience to put on your resume. Focus on your more recent achievements, as those will typically be most impressive to employers.

5. Irrelevant accomplishments. If you won the best knitter award at your Tuesday night class, good for you, but most hiring managers won’t care about that when they’re reading your resume. Use that space for something more applicable to the job you’re applying for instead.

   Similarly, if you are changing or have changed your career path, be careful about what you include from those past jobs as well. Include accomplishments and awards that recognize your transferable skills, but leave out any irrelevant experience.

Tips for Communicating Your Accomplishments Effectively

Now that you know which accomplishments you’re looking to include on your resume, there are some best practices on how to add them:

1. Make a list of accomplishments longer than you can include on your resume. It’s always better to have too many options than not enough, so before you begin to add anything to your resume, write out as many achievements as you can think of. This way, you can pick and choose which ones you want to include.

2. Adjust them to fit the job description you’re applying for. Once you have your list of accomplishments, compare them to the job description, and start noting which ones match it. Include those on your resume and save the rest for later applications.

   It’s important to tailor your resume to fit a particular job description because many companies use automated applicant tracking systems that scan your documents for keywords. No matter how impressive your resume is, if you don’t hit enough of the points the system is looking for, you won’t get through to human eyes.

3. Sprinkle them throughout your resume. There are several places you can include your accomplishments in your resume:

   • Your summary statement

   • Your work history

   • A dedicated accomplishments section

   Shoot to work your personal one or two most notable achievements into your summary statement and add the rest to your job experience bullet points. You can also go into more detail about the ones in your summary statement when you’re writing your experience section.

   If you have space and enough material to fill it, you can create a separate section for your achievements and awards. Just make sure you don’t force this if it doesn’t make sense for your resume.

   If you’ve had a long career, this section might be precious to you, as you can call it “Career Highlights” and bring hiring managers’ attention to the main achievements of your work over the years.

4. Demonstrate the impact of your accomplishment. Saying that you “redesigned processes” isn’t enough. You need to help hiring managers understand what you did by including the data that paints a picture of the fruits of your labors.

   So, a better way to word the previous example would be something like, “Streamlined data collection processes while increasing number of projects completed by 10% and decreasing errors by 15%.”

LaTanya Ward-Showers
LaTanya Ward-Showers

How are you presenting the value you have to offer a future employer? The best way to do this is to showcase your highlighted accomplishments on your resume.

Make a habit of saving kudos, positive feedback, and significant project details. Set monthly or quarterly calendar suspense’s as a reminder to gather specifics from your kudos file and update your resume. Stick to the plan and you will not be stressed with trying to cram everything last minute!

Accomplishments Example by Resume Section

Here’s an example of what listing your accomplishments may look like in each section of your resume:

Accomplishments Examples by Industry

If you’re struggling to know which types of accomplishments you should include in your resume, here are some ideas to get your wheels turning:

Author

Abby McCain

Abby is a writer who is passionate about the power of story. Whether it’s communicating complicated topics in a clear way or helping readers connect with another person or place from the comfort of their couch. Abby attended Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she earned a degree in writing with concentrations in journalism and business.

Expert

Don Pippin, MHRM, CPRW, CDCS

Don Pippin is an executive and HR leader for Fortune 50 and 500 companies and startups. In 2008, Don launched area|Talent with a focus on helping clients identify their brand. As a Certified Professional Resume Writer, Certified Digital Career Strategist, and Certified Personal Branding Strategist, Don guides clients through career transitions.