For most applicants, reverse chronological order is the clearest starting point: your most recent role first, working backwards. Most other format decisions are smaller than that one.
Why reverse chronological order
People reading a resume tend to think in terms of time: where you work now, where you were before, and what the path looks like. A chronological layout shows that at a glance.
The alternative is a functional or skills-based format, where history is grouped by skill with employers listed underneath. It can seem appealing if your history is uneven, but it removes the sense of time, so the reader cannot tell how long you spent anywhere or how your experience built up. A chronological layout with a visible gap is usually easier to follow than a format that obscures the timeline. There is more on gaps, contracts and career changes in a later article.
A common section order
Most resumes work well with a structure along these lines:
Name and contact details. Your name, kept plain, without a string of letters after it; qualifications can be written out in full elsewhere. Include a mobile number, and check the voicemail on it is a simple greeting with room for messages. A city and state is enough for location. A LinkedIn link is optional; include it only if the profile is current and adds something.
Career profile. A short summary of your experience, covered in writing a useful career profile. Useful for many people, though not compulsory.
Career highlights. A few specific examples, if you have strong ones relevant to the role.
Professional experience. Work history in reverse chronological order. Employer name on one side, dates on the other, title underneath, so the timeline is easy to follow down the page. If you held several titles at one employer, list the employer once with the overall dates, then each title with its own dates. If a former employer has been renamed or absorbed into another body, showing both names keeps the history verifiable.
Education and everything else. Education usually sits near the bottom once you have work experience. Certifications and specific skills can be listed here in a simple comma-separated line. Related unpaid work can go in the experience section, since unpaid work is still experience; unrelated volunteering fits better at the bottom under its own heading. Hobbies rarely help, photos are not expected in Australian applications, and "references available on request" adds nothing.
On mechanics: simple formatting is usually easier to read and less likely to cause problems when a document is uploaded or converted, so plain text, standard headings and a standard font are safer choices than tables, text boxes, graphics or multi-column layouts.
Length
There is no single correct length. Follow any page limit in the job advertisement or candidate information pack, because that instruction beats any general rule. Where none is given, two to three pages suits many experienced applicants, and one page is often enough early in a career.
Beyond that, aim for the shortest length that still gives the reader enough relevant evidence. Do not shrink the font, crowd the layout or cut useful information just to reach a smaller page count; equally, if the resume keeps growing, the fix is usually removing material that does not support the application rather than adjusting the formatting.
Templates
You do not need to design a layout from scratch. A basic Word template can save time; choose one with clear headings, consistent spacing, a standard font and no decorative graphics or complicated columns. Free templates of this kind are easy to find, and any that keeps the layout plain will suit the structure this series describes.
Dates
Years alone are fine for a long career; month and year reads better for shorter ones, where a single year is a large share of the history. In my own resume I use month and year throughout, whatever the age of the role. It avoids mismatches with application forms, which often ask for exact months, and saves deciding which roles get the shorter treatment. Whichever you choose, use it consistently.
Older roles: condense rather than delete
Experience from long ago rarely needs detail, but removing it entirely can leave questions about the timeline. The middle path is compression.
A role from fifteen or twenty years back can often be a single line: the employer, the years, and a sentence covering what the period involved. Several scattered early roles can be grouped: "Other experience, 1998–2006: various roles including [title] at [employer] and [title] at [employer]." Views differ on how far back a resume should go. A reasonable approach is to choose your starting point, show the roles from there to now without holes in the timeline, and let the detail fall away as you go back.
Relevant experience
Relevance decides what belongs, and it is a separate question from age. For a specialised application, roles unrelated to the field often add little, however recent. In my own resume, I eventually removed earlier retail and call-centre work at David Jones, Telstra and elsewhere once I had enough experience in data work, because it was taking space from the material that showed I could do the job.
That said, unrelated roles are not always dead weight. In my graduate-program applications, I included my retail jobs because they gave me evidence of reliability, a strong work ethic and leadership skills before I had much experience in my chosen field. Early in a career, roles like these can demonstrate continuity and transferable skills; even later, an otherwise unrelated role may still be worth a line if it shows something the vacancy asks for, such as supervision, service delivery or working under pressure. The question to ask of each role is what it adds to this application.