Academic resume examples by experience level

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An academic resume is a one to two page document used for the parts of higher education that hire like any other employer: professional staff posts, research positions off the tenure track, programme and centre administration, and every job you apply for when you leave the academy.

It is not a curriculum vitae, and choosing the wrong document is the most common mistake people with graduate training make. A CV is cumulative and unbounded. It lists everything you have ever produced because a faculty search committee is assessing a record. A resume is selective and bounded. It argues that you can do one named job, and anything that does not serve that argument comes off the page.

Resume guide for an academic resume

This guide and the corresponding academic resume example will cover:

• When an academic resume is wanted and when a CV is wanted instead
• How to write each section, and what to cut from a CV to get there
• Three adaptable summaries: research assistant, faculty, and centre director
• How to weight teaching, research and service for the post in front of you
• How large the academic sector is and what its main occupations pay

How to write an academic resume

Six sections: contact header, summary, experience, research and teaching evidence, education and funding, and skills. One page if you are within a few years of the doctorate, two once you are running things.

The hard part is subtraction. A working CV runs to eight, fifteen, forty pages. The resume keeps what the posting asks about and drops the rest into a linked online profile.

Run the finished file through the free Rezoom ATS resume checker before you submit. University human resources systems parse applications into structured records before a search chair opens them, and a two-column CV layout is where that parsing fails.

Choosing the best resume format for an academic resume

Reverse chronological. Graduate study, postdoctoral work and fixed-term appointments produce a timeline that looks broken to anyone outside the sector, and a functional format makes that worse by hiding the dates entirely.

Label the gaps rather than concealing them. A doctorate is a job, so write it as one: institution, dates, what you built, what it cost, what came out of it. A postdoc is a job. A teaching fellowship is a job. Written that way, a decade of training reads as ten years of employment, which is what it was.

Include your contact information

Use one email you will keep after the appointment ends. Institutional addresses are switched off when contracts finish, and a search that takes four months will outlive yours.

Put the ORCID or Google Scholar link in the header on a research resume and leave it off an administrative one, where it reads as a signal that you would rather be doing something else.

Make use of a summary

Four lines: what you are, the field, the scale of what you have handled, and one outcome with a number on it.

Education researcher completing a PhD in Educational Studies at the University of Michigan, with four years as a graduate research assistant on a federally funded longitudinal study of early literacy. Manage data collection across 14 partner schools and 1,860 pupils, run the cleaning and coding pipeline in R, and coordinate a team of six undergraduate coders. Three peer-reviewed publications, two as first author, and a dissertation on track for a spring 2027 defence.

Assistant Professor of Educational Studies at the University of Michigan, entering a fourth year on the tenure track, teaching two undergraduate lecture courses and one doctoral seminar to about 210 students a year. Nine peer-reviewed publications, six as first or corresponding author, and $640,000 in external funding as principal investigator. Supervise four doctoral students and chair the department's undergraduate curriculum committee.

Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Literacy Research at the University of Michigan, responsible for a $2.4M portfolio, 11 staff and a graduate training programme of 22 students. Grew the centre's external funding from $900,000 to $2.4M over five years and moved its completion rate for doctoral students from 61% to 84%. Publish, teach one seminar a term, and sit on the university's research integrity panel.

Right vs wrong: the same academic summary, twice

The right column can be checked in ten seconds. The left column is the same record written so that nobody has to take your word for anything.

Outline your experience

Title, institution, city, dates, and then three to five bullets. Each one carries a number: students taught, papers published, dollars administered, people supervised, or the change in something you were responsible for.

Assistant Professor of Educational Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, August 2022 to Present
Teach two undergraduate lecture sections and one doctoral seminar, about 210 students a year, with a mean course evaluation of 4.6 out of 5.
Principal investigator on three external awards totalling $640,000, including a four-year federal study of early literacy across 14 partner schools.
Published nine peer-reviewed articles, six as first or corresponding author, and one book chapter.
Supervise four doctoral students and chair the department's undergraduate curriculum committee, whose 2025 review rebuilt the major sequence.
Built and maintain the study's data pipeline in R, now used by two other projects in the department.

Academic CV or resume: which document the application actually wants

This is the decision that determines whether your file is read, and the rule is simple enough to apply in ten seconds.

Where the two documents overlap, the numbers must agree. Committees do compare, and a publication count that changes between files is worse than a low one.

Keep both, and keep both current. The CV is the master record you add to as things happen; the resume is generated from it for a specific posting and then thrown away.

The teaching, research and service split, and how to weight it

Every academic post divides into teaching, research and service, and every posting weights those three differently. Most applicants send the same ordering to all of them.

Read the advertisement for the weighting and reorder the page to match it.

• A research-intensive post wants publications, funding and method on page one. Teaching goes to a short block with courses, levels and enrolment.
• A teaching-focused or community college post wants courses taught, by name and level, with enrolment and outcomes. The publication list shrinks to a line saying how many and a link.
• A staff or administrative post wants neither in the old form. It wants budgets, headcount, delivery dates, committees chaired and things that changed because you ran them. Teaching becomes evidence of communication and service becomes evidence of governance.

Teaching: EDUC 210 Foundations of Literacy (lecture, 140 students, twice a year), EDUC 505 Research Design (doctoral seminar, 14 students), EDUC 390 Independent Research (6 students a year). Mean evaluation 4.6 of 5 across 11 sections.
Supervision: 4 doctoral students in progress, 3 defended; 6 undergraduate research assistants, 2 now in funded graduate programmes.
Service: Chair, undergraduate curriculum committee, 2024 to present. Member, research integrity panel. Reviewer for three journals in the field.

Build a snapshot of your key skills

Ten to fourteen entries in three groups: method, tools, and the things that read as employable outside the department.

Method: Longitudinal study design, Mixed methods, Multilevel modelling, Survey instrument design, Qualitative coding and interrater reliability, Research ethics and IRB protocols
Tools: R and tidyverse, Stata, Qualtrics, NVivo, Git, LaTeX
Delivery: Grant writing and post-award reporting, Budget management, Project scheduling, Supervision of research staff, Writing for non-specialist audiences, Conference and workshop organisation

The third group is the one that gets an academic hired outside the academy, and the one most people leave off because it feels like the part that is not real work.

List your education, funding and credentials

Degree, field, institution, year. Then the funding, because money won is the single most portable credential academic work produces.

PhD, Educational Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 2022. Dissertation: a longitudinal study of early literacy growth across 14 schools.
MA, Educational Studies, University of Michigan, 2018
BA, Linguistics, University of Oslo, Norway, 2015
Funding: Principal investigator on three external awards totalling $640,000, including a four-year federal study, 2023 to 2027. Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship, 2021.
Selected publications: 9 peer-reviewed articles, 6 as first or corresponding author. Full list at orcid.org.

Choose the right layout and design

Single column, plain type at 11 or 12 point, clear headings, no photograph and no personal details beyond city and contact. University portals parse the file before anyone reads it.

The size and shape of the academic sector

Higher education is a large sector that is growing while individual searches feel impossible, and both of those things are true at once.

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2025-35 projections and May 2025 wage data; BLS Employment Projections, employment by major industry sector, 27 August 2026.

What the main academic occupations pay

There is no single academic wage, because the sector is a stack of different occupations with different entry bars. These are the medians for the ones most graduate-trained people end up in.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2025 wage data.

The spread inside postsecondary teaching is the widest of any of them: the lowest 10 percent earned less than $49,540 and the highest 10 percent more than $203,580 as of May 2025, and by field the medians run from law teachers at $128,500 and economics at $123,920 down through the rest of the disciplines (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2025). Discipline and institution type decide most of that, not negotiation.

Every higher education career on Rezoom

This page is the entry point for the higher education side of the education category. Each link goes to a full resume guide with three adaptable examples and current pay data.

Faculty and instruction

• College professor resume
• Adjunct professor resume
• Instructional designer resume
• Academic tutor resume
• Tutor resume

Research

• Research assistant resume

Libraries and collections

• Academic librarian resume
• Librarian resume

Student services and administration

• College admissions resume
• Resident assistant resume
• School counselor resume

Qualifications and sector guides

• Master's degree resume
• Education sector resume
• Harvard application resume

Routes in from school teaching

• Teacher resume
• High school teacher resume
• Math teacher resume
• English teacher resume
• ESL teacher resume
• Special education teacher resume
• Art teacher resume
• Student teacher resume
• Substitute teacher resume
• Principal resume
• Assistant principal resume

Key takeaways for an academic resume

1. Decide between a resume and a CV first; the posting tells you which.
2. Write the doctorate, the postdoc and every fixed-term post as a job with dates and scale.
3. Put money administered and people supervised on the page; both travel anywhere.
4. Name courses with level and enrolment, not "undergraduate teaching".
5. Reorder teaching, research and service to match the weighting in the advertisement.
6. Link the full record once from the header and cut everything else.
7. Use a personal email address that will still work in four months.

Build your academic resume in 15 minutes.

Related education resume examples

• College professor resume
• Adjunct professor resume
• Research assistant resume
• Academic librarian resume
• Academic tutor resume
• Instructional designer resume
• College admissions resume
• Resident assistant resume
• Librarian resume
• School counselor resume
• Master's degree resume
• Education sector resume

Pair it with a matching academic cover letter.