How do you add an internship or volunteering work to a professional resume? Though you may well be aware of how to add the basic sections: education, employment history, and achievements to your resume; you may not be entirely clear on how to add and where to put internship experience. Here’s what you need to know about internship and volunteering work in respect to your professional resume.

The Related Skills and Achievements Section

Where do you put your internships and volunteer experience in the course of your resume to make it as effective and professional as possible? The best place to put it-if you do not already a section for this-is in your Related Skills and Achievements section. You can include subsections if you have more achievements, training, and internships to offer than one-or if you do not have much info to include about your internship, you can just include it with a bullet point under this section.

Use It as Professional Experience

Though it may be put under the skills and achievement section, you should still present it with as much weight and depth as professional experience-especially, if you are lacking in real world career experience. How do you do this? Include the responsibilities and achievements that you have had within that internship, and what you learned that you can apply to this position.

Create an Internship Section

If you have a lot to say about a particular internship, or perhaps more than one internship; create a section that is dedicated just to “Internship Experience”. This will single out the importance of these professional experiences, as well as adding more depth to your overall professional career experience.

Add Testimonials

In keeping with a plan to offer extra details on the internships that you have had , you should include testimonials from employers, supervisors, and colleagues that worked with you at your internship. This tells an employer that you have solid professional references, and offers more detail on what you learned and have taken away from the experience to be used in their position that you are applying for.

Don’t Go Overboard

Though you should provide details of your responsibilities and achievements in an internship, you should also be careful not to exaggerate and go over board with details and fodder. Employers can see through empty sentences with big words, and do not appreciate it when you try to fill up a resume with fluff-instead of the substance of your internship.

What Should It Look Like?

Basically, depending on which section you decide to present your internship information under, will determine where on your resume it will be; but, in stating the actually details of your internship, there should be a standard format used. You should start with the dates of hire, what company you worked for, the city and state of the company, what your formal title was, and bullets explaining what your responsibilities and/or achievements were. It should look like this:
May 2008-September 2008    Summer Publishing Intern
Lauren Publishing Co
Carson City, NV

  • Responsibilities/Achievements
  • Responsibilities/Achievements
  • Responsibilities/Achievements
  • Responsibilities/Achievements
  • Responsibilities/Achievements
  • Responsibilities/Achievements