6 Tips For Including Your Presentation Experience On A Resume
A resume is critical for introducing yourself and your skills when applying for a job. Resumes can also be important when applying for school, scholarships, and grants. Your resume should include your education, skills, and work experience. However, relevant presentation experience may also strengthen your resume, especially in academia. Keep reading to get ideas for including your presentation experience on a resume to ensure you put your best foot forward.
How to Include Presentations On a Resume
1. Find the Right Section
You can add your presentation experience to the skills section of your resume. This may be the best approach if you have minimal experience or the specific presentations you've given don't closely relate to your field. You can still show that you have the skills to research a topic and speak in public. Alternatively, you can list your presentations under your achievements section to show what you've accomplished.
For those who wish to focus on the quantity of presentations over the specific presentations, you can list them in your resume overview or summary. As you build your resume, you may want to list your presentation experience separately, however.
2. Link to Slides
If your presentations involve slideshows that are easy to understand without your voiceover, you can link your slides in your resume as an example of how you research and explain things. You will need a place where you can upload your presentation files so you can link to them in the text on your resume. Of course, these links will only work with a PDF version of your resume that hasn't been stripped by application software. But this touch may be appreciated when humans see your resume. Consider a reminder to periodically check that the links still work to ensure your effort isn't wasted.
3. Add a Portfolio
You may want to add a full portfolio if you can upload documents in addition to your resume. This highlights your presentation experience and can also be useful if you're interested in design or development roles because you can show off your ability to create a functional and attractive portfolio. Portfolios are more common in some industries and fields than others, however, so researching the trends in your specific field might be helpful.
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4. Consider a CV
For those who are applying for academic positions, a CV might be a better option than a resume. CVs aren't expected to be as brief as resumes and typically include a section for presentations. With this space, you can show how you have contributed to your field in meaningful ways and highlight your expertise without worrying about taking up too much space. In the presentations section, you can include the title of the presentation along with the name and date (year) of the event and the main topic of the presentation. If your presentation won any awards or is related to any publications, you may include that information, too.
5. Break Them Down
If you have plenty of presentation experience, you may want to further separate them into groups such as:
Invited conference presentations (Speaker)
Contributions to conference presentations (Contributor)
Academic presentations
Non-academic presentations
You may also want to differentiate between in-person and virtual (Zoom) presentations to enhance organization. However, categorizing presentations like this doesn't work well if you only have a few under your belt.
6. Prioritize Significant Work
As you become more experienced, the list of presentations you've given or contributed to might grow quite long. Even if you categorize them, the list may become unruly. At this point, it may be time to cull the herd to focus on the most significant and relevant talks you've given. This may mean leaving some talks off your resume entirely or creating different versions of your resume for different roles and including only the presentations that relate to those roles.
What Not to Include On Your Resume
A resume should be tailored to the specific job to which you're applying. This means you can remove skills or experience that do not apply to this role to keep your resume concise. Otherwise, recruiters or hiring managers might miss the pertinent information because it's overwhelmed by unnecessary text on your resume.
While some skills may occasionally be useful on a resume, most personal information should never be included. Unless it relates to your decision to leave a previous job or apply for the current opening, keep these facts off your resume. This includes your age or birthday, religion, personal social media links, current salary, or political leanings. It's typical to include hobbies and interests, especially those relevant to the role, but you do not want to sacrifice valuable space for these items that would better be used listing experience such as giving presentations.
Additional Readings:
How To Answer The Interview Question: What Are You Passionate About?
How To Future-Proof Your Career With Upskilling and Microcredentialing
Leveraging The STAR Method To Keep Interview Answers Short But Powerful
Meet The Writer!
My name is Taylor McKnight and I am a Senior Digital PR Specialist representing Presentation Training Institute. Presentation Training Institute is a company specializing in different kinds of presentation resources and presentation training.
