Resume

What to include

• ✦Lead with a professional summary, not a generic objective statement. Pack it with your specific value and 2 to 3 keywords from the role you want.
• ✦Give white space room to breathe. Dense blocks of text read as harder to scan, not more impressive.
• ✦Say how you used your tools, for example "Figma for high-fidelity prototyping." Do not just list names like Figma or Claude Design.
• ✦Make your portfolio link prominent and active. It often carries more weight than the resume itself.
• ✦Show your whole design process (research, ideation, testing, iteration), not just the output. Skipping it leaves a gap in how you work.
• ✦Keep education and experience weighted differently by career stage. Early-career: include class projects, competitions, or volunteer work, and put education near the top to highlight your training. Senior: focus on the last 10 to 15 years of relevant roles, move education to the bottom, and lead with vision, business impact, and how you’ve mentored or managed others.

Writing bullets that show impact

A formula that works: [action verb] + [task or project] + [metric] + [timeframe] = [impact]. For example:

• ✦“Redesigned the checkout flow, cutting cart abandonment by 18% over 2 months, resulting in $60K in monthly revenue.” (product design)
• ✦“Rewrote onboarding error messages, reducing related support tickets by 25% in the first quarter.” (content design)

Whatever the number is, name it. A product design bullet might point to a change in conversion, retention, error rates, or task completion time. A content design bullet might point to engagement, sign-ups, organic traffic, or production time saved.

Formatting for ATS

• ✦Use a single-column layout. Headers, footers, graphics, tables, and complex symbols can scramble how an ATS reads your resume.
• ✦Stick to standard fonts (Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Garamond, or Georgia) at 10 to 12 points for body text.
• ✦Mirror the job posting’s own language. If the listing says "usability testing," use that exact phrase, along with the exact job title, rather than a rough synonym.
• ✦Save as a PDF or .docx, and check the specific application’s preferred format before you submit.

Think of your resume as an early product release: to an ATS, it has to be bug-free (correctly formatted) and searchable (the right keywords are in there).

If you’re switching careers into UX

• ✦Pull out the cross-functional skills that already map to design work instead of recycling your old job descriptions. Managing clients or budgets is navigating project constraints, prior research or interviewing experience is user research, and delivering results on time and on budget is a universal skill design also values.
• ✦Build a dedicated "Projects" section. This is the single most important part of a career-changer’s resume: bootcamp capstones, freelance work, and volunteer projects all count as real evidence.
• ✦Place recent design certifications (Google UX Design, NN/g, a bootcamp) near the top as a signal, and condense unrelated history down to what’s still relevant.
• ✦Use your summary to connect the dots explicitly for the recruiter. Do not make them guess how a teaching background relates to UX. Say it directly.
• ✦Frame your past achievements as outcomes, even from a different field. "Responsible for customer service" says less than what that responsibility produced.

Do this / not this

Other perspectives