Creative section headings file your experience under nothing

After a parser extracts your text, it has to work out which part is your work history and which part is your education. It does this by scanning for headings it recognises against a fixed list.

Match the list, and everything under the heading is filed correctly. Miss it, and the content lands in a generic bucket — or gets attached to whatever section came before.

Headings that are recognised

Use these, exactly:

• Work Experience (or Experience, Employment History, Professional Experience)
• Education
• Skills (or Technical Skills, Core Competencies)
• Summary (or Professional Summary, Profile)
• Certifications
• Projects

Headings that are not

Anything designed to show personality: My Journey, Where I’ve Been, What I Bring, The Story So Far, My Toolkit, Career Highlights Reel. Also ambiguous single words like Background, Work, or More.

The cost is invisible. A recruiter filtering for candidates with five years of experience is querying a computed field, and that field is computed from whatever the parser filed as employment history. If your roles were never filed there, you fail the filter with a decade of relevant work on the page.

Make headings look like headings

Recognition is not only about the words. Give a heading structural signals:

• Put it on its own line, with nothing else beside it.
• Set it slightly larger than body text, or bold, or in capitals — one of those, consistently.
• Leave clear space above it.
• Do not add decoration inside the text, like — — EXPERIENCE — —.

Where personality goes instead

Into the bullets. A heading is a filing label with about six safe values. The sentences underneath are unconstrained, and that is where a reader forms an impression anyway.