What is a summary of qualifications?
A summary of qualifications is a type of resume introduction that focuses on your key career-related achievements. A summary of qualifications for a resume has four to six bullet points that highlight your most impressive accomplishments, skills, and experiences.
This type of resume introduction is known by several other names, listed here:
- Qualifications summary
- Resume qualifications
- Statement of qualifications
- Skills summary
Who should use a summary of qualifications?
If you’re an experienced professional in your industry, writing a summary of qualifications is the simplest way to increase your chances of landing an interview because it places your most relevant and impressive experiences, skills, and achievements at the top of your resume where hiring managers will immediately see them.
Use a summary of qualifications if you:
- Have a long record of achievements in your field
- Possess high-level certifications related to your target job
- Are able to demonstrate special skills on your resume
A summary of qualifications is less appropriate if you have no (or little) work experience, or if you’re transferring into a new industry. The only exception is if you’ve developed a wide range of skills and gained experience from other activities such as studying at college or volunteer work.
For instance, if you served in student government, you could write an effective summary of qualifications detailing your successes and the leadership skills you gained, as well as listing your academic achievements.
Summary of Qualifications Examples
Here’s an example summary of qualifications for an executive assistant of a major publicly listed company:
And here’s a text version you can copy and paste:
Summary of Qualifications for Executive Assistant (Text Version)
- Executive assistant with 10+ years of experience supporting CEO of [Company Name]
- Oversee office budget of $47K per month
- Slashed travel expenses by $7.4K by directly negotiating with service providers
- Manage team of 17 administrative support specialists
Looking for something more relevant to your own background? Here are some additional qualification summary examples for industries popular across our website:
Summary of Qualifications (Customer Service Manager)
- Manage team of 47 customer service representatives
- Resolve 95%+ of customer complaints passed on from customer service representatives
- Organize roster for 3 shifts working 24/7 with <1% mistake rate
- Organized 4 annual training sessions on client relations, which led to 17% decrease in client cancellations
Accounting Resume Summary of Qualifications Example
- Manage $1.5 mil. budget, with a 14.7% reduction in costs over 3 years
- Supervise and organize a team of 7 junior associates, preparing training and ensuring they work at 100% efficiency
- Analyze supply costs averaging $500K a month, and secured 4% discount from suppliers
- Applied fluent Mandarin skills to source new, 17% less expensive service providers from Malaysia
Summary of Qualifications (Manager)
- Reduced staff turnover by ⅓ within my first year
- Exceeded sales forecast by average of $10K over four years
- Recruited, hired, and trained 47 new hires, developing them into productive and competent team members
- Recognized as one of the Top 10 managers nationwide by headquarters
Summary of Qualifications for Teachers
- Increased high-school graduates’ GPA by an average of 0.5 within 1 year
- Promoted to Director of Science within 18 months due to strong management and organizational skills
- Trained 5 newly certified science teachers over 6 years
- Provided support to 7 promising homeschool room pupils, 6 of whom were accepted into Ivy League colleges
Nurse Practitioner Resume Summary of Qualifications
- Developed and maintained new EMR system, which increased efficiency by 17%
- Provided critical care for an average of 74 patients per year post surgery
- Mentored 11 new registered nurses to deliver exceptional standards of clinical care
- Recognized as Florida’s “Nurse Practitioner of the Year 2021” due to COVID-19 response
How to Write a Qualifications Summary
Each bullet point of a qualifications summary should showcase your most impressive work-related accomplishments, certifications, and skills.
Not being repetitive is key to writing a successful summary of qualifications. For example, if you’re a nurse practitioner, don’t repeat information about how many patients you’ve treated:
Repetitive Summary of Qualifications
- Provided critical care for an average of 74 patients post surgery per year
- Treated an average of 24 outpatients per day
Instead, try to make your bullet points focus on different parts of your career:
Good Summary of Qualifications
- Developed and maintained new EMR system, which increased efficiency by 17%
- Provided critical care for an average of 74 patients per year post surgery
- Mentored 11 new registered nurses to deliver exceptional standards of clinical care
- Recognized as Florida’s “Nurse Practitioner of the Year 2021” due to COVID-19 response
From top to bottom, these bullets focus on:
- Initiative and organizational skills
- Patient care
- Teaching and leadership skills
- Awards/honors
When you write your summary of qualifications, think about your:
- Years of experience
- Key hard and soft skills
- Creativity and times you took the initiative
- Workplace efficiency
- Any awards you’ve won or recognition gained
- Whether you’ve held positions of leadership
After you’ve narrowed down your list of qualifications, put the most impressive four to six at the top of your resume, just after your resume header.
Making your qualifications summary bullet points relevant to the job means that your resume introduction needs to be different for every job you apply to. But if you’ve already compiled a long list of your most impressive achievements, skills, and experience, writing a new summary of qualifications for each resume should be as simple as switching out bullet points for other ones.
Finally, make sure your summary of qualifications looks good on the resume template you use. If possible, keep each bullet point on a single line like this:
Happy job hunting!
