Laura Decarlo: Hi! I'm Laura Decarlo, certified expert resume writer and President of the Professional Association of Rsum Writers and Career Coaches, Career Directors International. I am sharing strategies for creating your dynamic and compelling resume. Right now, I am going to talk about the other relevant sections you will want or need to include in your resume.

These sections may or may not be included and can be introduced in a number of mix-and-match combinations. These sections include education, training, certification and licensure, professional affiliations, awards and honors, publications, presentations, volunteer work and a technology snapshot. You might notice I did not include references in this list. This is because, unless specifically requested, you should leave references off your resume. But some employers have policies that would require them to excuse you from consideration if references are included. Where you choose to list these sections on the resume and how you list them will be determined by how important they are to your job target. For instance, you may not have any formal higher education such as a degree, so you might only include a specialized training section. Or you might have one degree, one certification and three relevant courses; creating three separate sections with so little content in each one would be space wasting. So instead, you might create a section called Education, Training and Certification. This same strategy would apply if you have few professional affiliations, leadership roles or volunteer positions. This could be combined to create one additional Leadership and Affiliation section. Now, when you have the reverse situation with too many of one particular item, such as training course or certifications, it can become much easier to display them on your resume under separate sections. Once you have determined what you have to list and how to segment it, you next need to look at how to visually present it in your resume.

Since you have just seconds for the scanning of these secondary sections, you want to make it easy and quick for an employer to review. Effective strategies for these include, play up what is important, such as degrees earned versus schools attended; that is as simple as listing the degree first and bolding it before the school name.

Avoid long lists and look to segment name under different topics if you have a large number of training and professional affiliations. Place sections in the order of greatest relevance to your target. Leave off dates in these sections if they do not help you towards your target. For instance, if relevant volunteer work or degrees were in the 1970s, this might make your knowledge or contributions appear dated. Make sure the section might not be better incorporated somewhere else in the resume. For instance, if you have sales performance awards, don't put them at the end of your resume in an Award section. Instead, make them standout as part of your results in your employment chronology.

Now that you are familiar with all the sections that you might include on your resume, I'll next talk about putting it altogether to make your resume powerful.