UC Berkeley Resume Template

UC Berkeley's Career Engagement office writes the most ATS-conscious resume guide of any top US school. Its samples are deliberately plain — single column, no decoration, no photo — and the published advice spends as much time on what an applicant tracking system can read as on what a recruiter wants to see. The result is a one-page resume that survives every keyword-matching filter and still reads cleanly to a human.

This template gives you that ATS-safe skeleton: predictable section headings, parsable date formatting, and bullets engineered around the keywords from a job description.

• Length: one page.
• Font: Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman at 10–12 pt. Berkeley's samples favor Arial for ATS-friendliness.
• Margins: 0.5"–1" all sides.
• Layout: single column. No text boxes, no tables, no headers/footers — these confuse ATS parsers.
• Dates: consistent Month Year format (e.g. Aug 2024 – May 2025), right-aligned.
• Photo: never on a US application.

Career Engagement allows a short "Profile" or "Summary of Qualifications" for career changers — 2–3 lines, under the contact block. It explicitly recommends using keywords from the target job description here so the resume scores well in ATS keyword-matching.

Berkeley's bullet pattern: verb, action, scope, result. The career office adds an ATS twist — every bullet should also include at least one keyword from the target job description.

• Open with a strong past-tense verb.
• Quantify scope (team size, budget, dataset, customers).
• Name the result with a number wherever possible.
• Cap each bullet at two lines.
• Tailor 2–3 bullets per role to the keywords in the specific job description.

Education leads the resume until you have 2–3 years of full-time experience.

• University of California, Berkeley — then degree, then graduation date.
• Include GPA only if it is 3.0 or above. Berkeley's threshold is lower than Harvard's 3.5 because a 3.0 at Berkeley is considered competitive.
• Honors (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), study abroad, and major-specific scholarships appear as sub-entries.
• If you're a transfer, list the originating community college below the Berkeley entry.

Skills sit near the bottom of the page. Group by category — Technical, Languages, Certifications — and list specific tools. Career Engagement explicitly recommends mirroring the technical keywords from the target job description in this section so the resume scores well against ATS keyword filters.

• Putting contact info in the document header/footer. Many ATS parsers ignore those regions.
• Using text boxes or tables. Both confuse parsing.
• Generic, untargeted skill lists. Mirror the job description's keywords.
• Listing GPA below 3.0.
• Skipping the city/state on your role line. Berkeley's samples always include it.