10 Resume Examples for Teens and Early Career Adults

Writing a resume as a teen or early-career adult can be challenging. Chances are, you have limited work experience, and the jobs that you have done may not be directly applicable to the role you’re applying for.

Plus, you’ve not applied for many jobs before. This can leave you with questions: How do you know which resume styles really work? Are your parents’ and teachers’ resume tips still relevant, or do they seem old-fashioned to today’s employers? Will the visually attractive resumes you see online net you an interview or are they just flashy gimmicks?

Fortunately, resume writing doesn’t have to be guesswork. Keep reading as we break down how to write an excellent and modern resume while making the most of your limited experience. We’ll include plenty of examples that you can model your own resume on.

What to Include in Your Resume

This contains everyone you need to include in your resume, along with how to structure it.

Name and Contact Information

Use your name as the document title, and include the following information beneath it:

• Your phone number
• A professional email address; ideally, it will be a variant of your name
• If relevant: your home address (e.g. the listing asks you to live within X miles of the workplace)
• If relevant: a portfolio URL
• If relevant: social media handles (e.g. LinkedIn, GitHub for coding roles, Instagram or TikTok for social media marketing roles)

While the majority of your resume should be left-aligned and in one single column, you can choose to center this section if you want. Depending on your resume style and the amount of space you have, you can use multiple lines for your contact details or fit them all into one.

For example:

Your Name

yourname@gmail.com | (012)345-6789 mygraphicdesignportfolio.com

Or:

Your Name

Tampa, Florida | (987)654-3210 | yourname@gmail.com | LinkedIn.com/YourName

Professional Summary

The professional summary goes beneath your contact information. Use it to give a quick overview of who you are, what your career goal is and why you’re the ideal candidate for the role. It should be no more than two to five sentences long, and ideally, you’ll include some of the key skills required for the role.

While it might feel counterintuitive, you don’t need to use full sentences in this section. Unless it would make the sentence confusing, you can skip “I am,” especially in the first sentence.

For example:

"A responsible and professional high school student with a passion for helping others, I am looking for a part-time role in customer service."

Or:

"A marketing graduate with experience in B2B social media marketing and crisis communications. Passionate about Analytics and data-driven campaigns, and looking for an opportunity to combine my marketing and communications know-how with my interest in fashion."

The first professional summary could be used by a teenager applying for their first retail job. Since they have no experience, they would focus their professional summary on their personality traits and motivation instead.

The second, on the other hand, is targeted to specific roles (B2B social media marketing in the fashion industry) and highlights areas of expertise and experience using likely keywords from the job listing. It’s well-suited to an early-career adult who knows what they want from their job.

Skills

Use the skills section to list the most relevant hard and soft skills you have for the role. Include no more than eight, using bullet points, and back them up with evidence. This could be certification, metrics or experiences.

For example:

• Fluent in French (CEFR C1) and Spanish (CEFR C2)

Or:

• Bilingual; run a weekly French podcast averaging 4,000 listeners per episode

Education

Which is more impressive for the role you’re applying for: your work experience or your education? Whichever section it is, you want to place it straight after the skills section.

Keep your education section brief. In the US, if you’ve graduated college, you don’t need to include your high school certificate. You should also omit your GPA unless it’s 3.5 or higher.

However, double-check requirements for roles abroad: you might be expected to include your entire educational history complete with GPAs.

For example:

Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, GPA 3.9, 2022 University of California, Los Angeles

Or:

Master of Science in Architecture (expected completion date: 2024) University of Michigan

Work History

When you have more work experience, you can begin carefully selecting the jobs that you include on your resume. As a teen or early-career adult, however, you’ll probably want to include every role you’ve had.

When listing roles, make sure to include the company name, your title and your start and finish date. Use bullet points to detail your responsibilities and achievements for each job, repeating keywords from the job listing.

Again, you don’t need to use full sentences here. Skip the subject (“I”) and try to use power verbs.

For example:

PC Universe

Sales Assistant (part-time), July 2022 — present

• Provide exceptional customer service; customer satisfaction rating of 95%

Or:

JLM Accounting

Accounting Intern, November 2021 — March 2022

• Delivered over 50 balance sheets and income statements

Resume Tips & Tricks for Job-Hunting Success

Resume success doesn’t just come down to the information you include. It’s also a question of how you format and present that information. So:

Stay Concise

The more white space, the better. Keep your resume on one page at this stage of your career, use a single column, and cut unnecessary sections.

Optimize for an Applicant Tracking System

More and more companies use machine reading to filter out resumes. To make sure your resume makes it through to a real person:

• Save it as a PDF or Word file
• Use keywords from the job listing
• Don’t use the header or footer sections of the document
• Favor a simple layout over graphics that probably aren’t machine-readable

Use a Professional Layout

Your resume should stand out for the content, not your font choice, so follow formatting best practices. Don’t edit the margins or use different colors. Use Arial or Times New Roman, size 11 or 12.

Resume Writing Made Simple

There’s a lot to consider when crafting a strong resume that will catch a recruiter’s eye. Whether you’re applying for a Saturday job, an internship or your first graduate role, you need to pay attention to the small details: keywords from the job listing, white space, font size, conciseness and more.

That doesn’t mean you need to spend hours second-guessing yourself, though. Use our tips as a starting point to build a polished and professional resume. Or, even better, adapt one of our millions of resume templates. Each one is machine-readable, attractively designed and easy to customize.

Plus, our resume builder will help you select the best structure based on your experience and education. It will even suggest recruiter-approved phrasing so you can make an excellent first impression on recruiters and employers.

With our tools, you can build your resume in minutes. Get started now.