Biotechnology & Life Sciences Resume Builder. Your resume made professional

Techniques you've run yourself belong ahead of any project description. A skills line such as "qPCR, mammalian cell culture, ELISA, flow cytometry, HPLC" lets a hiring scientist see at a glance whether you fit their bench, and the BLS profile of biological technicians describes the usual preparation as a biology or related bachelor's plus hands-on lab work. Then say what kind of setting it was. If you've worked under FDA's CGMP regulations, which set minimum requirements for the methods, facilities and controls used in drug manufacturing, name the SOPs you wrote, the batch records you reviewed and the deviations you closed.

Useful numbers here include samples processed per week, assays developed or validated, turnaround time, and batch records completed right the first time. Quality-track professionals with five years of GMP experience, three of them in a decision-making role, can sit for ASQ's Certified Pharmaceutical GMP Professional (CPGP) exam.

Coming from academia? Trim the CV into a resume of a page or two, with methods and results first and a short Selected Publications section last. For example: "Optimized a sandwich ELISA, cutting run time from six hours to four while keeping intra-assay variation under 10%."

• How do I list publications on a biotech resume?

  Give them their own section after your experience, newest first, in the citation style your field uses, with your name in bold so a reader can spot your author position. End each entry with its DOI. Label anything not yet peer reviewed: NIH requires grant applicants who cite a preprint to include its DOI and the object type, such as "Preprint," and a resume reader deserves the same clarity.

  Add your ORCID iD to the header. ORCID describes it as a unique, persistent identifier for researchers, so a hiring scientist can open your whole record. With a long list, keep the five most relevant entries and point to ORCID for the rest.

• Which lab techniques belong on a biotech resume?

  Pair each technique with the system you ran it in, as in "CRISPR knockouts in HEK293 cells" or "western blots imaged on a LI-COR Odyssey," so a reader sees depth rather than a keyword list. Then add the conditions you're trained for. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) describes four biosafety levels, BSL-1 to BSL-4, each building on the controls of the one below, so name the highest you've worked at. For animal studies funded by the U.S. Public Health Service, an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) must confirm that the people doing procedures are trained in them, so list each species and procedure you've been trained on.

• How do I list a patent on a resume?

  Give granted patents and pending applications separate lines, because they mean different things. For a granted patent, write the title, the patent number and the issue date, and add "co-inventor" if you shared it. For an application, use its application or publication number and the word "pending." The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) says "patent pending" has no legal effect: it tells the public an application has been filed, and protection starts once a patent is granted. Keep patents in their own section or beside publications, and tie each to an experience bullet about the work behind it.

• How do I rewrite a postdoc CV as an industry resume?

  Write the postdoc as a job you did, not a training slot. A 2007 NIH and NSF definition describes a postdoc as someone with a doctorate in a temporary, defined period of mentored advanced training, yet a hiring manager reading a Postdoctoral Fellow entry wants the work: the question you owned, the method you built and what came of it.

  Cut teaching or committee lines unless the posting asks for them, and add work a company would recognize, such as a method another lab adopted or a project with an industry partner. Then aim your summary at the title you want next, such as Scientist at a company or Research Scientist at an institute, using the posting's own terms.