Category
Resume & Cover Letters
Resume & Cover Letters guides on Careertrailhead.
Teacher Cover Letter Examples
The samples below are templates for three common situations: a first job after student teaching, an experienced secondary teacher changing districts or states, and a career changer coming in through an alternative certification route. Each one has bracketed placeholders so it cannot be sent as it stands, and each is followed by a short explanation of why it is built that way.
Tobias Amarinde · 10 min read
How to Write a Cover Letter for a Career Change
A career change cover letter has one job: explain, in a page or less, why you are moving fields and why the skills you already have transfer to the role in front of you. It does the connecting work your resume can't, because your resume lists job titles from an industry the reader may not know.
Marguerite Dunlevy · 11 min read
How to Write a Resume With No Experience
Writing a resume with no formal experience is mostly a sorting problem, not a writing problem. You almost certainly have material — classes, volunteering, a part-time job in an unrelated field, a project you finished on your own — and the task is to pick the parts that match the job you want, then describe them in the employer's words.
Priya Sehgal-Wren · 9 min read
How to Write a Resume for a Job You're Overqualified For
Being overqualified is a framing problem, not a skills problem. The reader of your resume has to believe you want this job, will stay in it, and can take direction from someone less experienced than you — and they decide that from the top third of page one. Your job when drafting is to narrow the focus to what the role actually needs, keep every title, date and qualification truthful, and let numbers do the persuading.
Tobias Amarinde · 9 min read
Internal Promotion Resume Examples
Applying for a job where you already work is a different writing problem from applying cold. The people reading you may know your work, but they still have to compare you on paper against external applicants, and the file usually travels through the same system and the same screens as everyone else's. The examples below show two ways to structure that document: one for a straight step up on your current team, one for a move into a different department where your titles don't match the posting.
Desmond Okafor-Lee · 9 min read
How to Write a Resume After a Long Employment Gap
A long break in your work history changes a few decisions on your resume: which format to use, how precisely to date your jobs, whether the gap gets its own line, and which recent activity goes at the top. It does not change the basic job of the document, which is to show an employer what you can do for them now.
Ingrid Castellanos · 9 min read
Resume vs CV (Curriculum Vitae): What's the Difference
A resume is a short, targeted summary of the experience that matters for one job. A CV (curriculum vitae) is a full record of your academic and research work, and in the US it is mostly used for faculty, postdoc, fellowship and grant applications. Picking the wrong one usually means sending too much detail to an employer who wanted two pages, or too little to a search committee that wanted your whole publication list.
Ingrid Castellanos · 8 min read
Resume Examples for Employment Gaps
A gap in your work history changes how you lay out a resume more than it changes what goes in it. The two resume templates below show the same material arranged two ways — one that leads with grouped skills, one that keeps dates in front but limits how far back they go — plus a short cover letter opening for when you want to name the gap yourself.
Marguerite Dunlevy · 9 min read
Career Change Resume Examples
Changing fields means your job titles no longer explain what you can do, so the resume has to do that work instead. The examples below show two common pivots — a long-tenured worker moving to a new industry, and a shorter sideways step into an adjacent role — and how the layout changes between them.
Priya Sehgal-Wren · 8 min read
How to Write a Cover Letter When One Isn't Required
When a job posting leaves the cover letter field blank or marks it "optional," you have a choice most people resolve by doing nothing. Writing one is usually worth the thirty minutes: Indeed (June 2026) notes that a cover letter can only help your application unless the posting specifically asks you not to send one, and that including one signals you take the opportunity seriously. This guide covers what to collect first, how to draft each paragraph in order, and what a short, adaptable excerpt looks like.
Desmond Okafor-Lee · 10 min read
Chronological vs Functional vs Combination Resume: Which Should You Use
Chronological, functional and combination resumes contain mostly the same information. What changes is the order it appears in, and therefore what a recruiter reads in the first few seconds. Chronological leads with your job history, functional leads with grouped skills, and combination puts a skills summary on top of a dated job list.
Priya Sehgal-Wren · 7 min read
Resume Mistakes to Fix Before You Apply
Most resume problems are not mysterious. They are a handful of specific, checkable faults — a typo in the first line, a job title buried under three lines of prose, a file that software cannot read properly — and each one has a fix you can make in an afternoon.
Marguerite Dunlevy · 7 min read