A good project can prove a skill faster than a job title can. This guide shows you how to put projects on a resume: when a Projects section earns its space, where it goes, how an entry should look on the page, and how to write bullets that show what you built and what came of it. You'll find worked examples of academic, personal, freelance and open-source projects, for technical and non-technical roles.
When projects belong on your resume, and where
A Projects section is worth adding when your projects show skills your job titles don't. That usually means:
Students and new graduates, whose best work is a final-year project, capstone or dissertation.
Career changers, who have built something in the new field before being hired in it. Our career change resume guide covers this case.
Developers, designers, analysts and writers, where a link to real work says more than a list of skills.
Freelancers and contractors, whose work is a series of client jobs rather than one employer.
Where the section goes depends on how strong it is next to the rest of the page:
Above Experience if you're a student or changing careers and the projects are your best evidence.
Below Experience if you already have relevant jobs and the projects add something extra.
Inside a job entry if the project was part of your job. A system you built at work is an achievement under that role, not a separate project.
Two to four projects is plenty. Choose the ones closest to the job you're applying for, not the ones you're fondest of.
How to format a project entry
Each project needs a title line, the context, the tools and one to three bullets. On the page, a personal software project might look like this:
Pantry, a grocery expiry tracker — personal project, January-April 2026
Built a web app that reads photographed grocery receipts and reminds users before items go out of date; 40 friends and classmates used it over two months.
Wrote the receipt-reading module and 85 automated tests; cut misread items on a 200-receipt test set from 31 to 6.
A few rules make entries easy to read, for people and for software:
Name the context. Personal project, course project (with the module name), client project or open-source contribution. The reader should know at a glance whether it was assessed, commissioned or self-started.
List tools on one line, using the exact names from job ads (PostgreSQL, Figma, Power BI), so keyword searches find them.
Write links as plain text, short and readable, such as github.com/yourname/pantry. A clickable icon with no visible address is useless on paper.
Give dates in the same format as your jobs. Month and year is enough.
Keep group work honest: give the team size and your part, such as "one of four; built the booking flow".
Writing project bullets that show results
A project bullet answers three questions: what was it for, what did you build or do, and what happened? You won't have sales figures, but you can usually measure something honest:
Who used it: classmates, a club, a local business, downloads, visitors.
How well it works: accuracy, load time, test coverage, errors before and after.
How big it is: rows of data, pages, screens, hours of footage.
What it led to: a grade, a prize, a client coming back, a feature adopted by others.
Weak lines and rewrites:
Weak: "Made a weather app using APIs." Stronger: "Built an Android weather app in Kotlin that caches forecasts for offline use; cut data use per session by about half compared with my first version."
Weak: "Did a data analysis project." Stronger: "Analysed a year of public bike-share trip data (2.1 million rows) in Python and SQL to find where docks ran empty at rush hour; presented a rebalancing plan to my statistics class."
Weak: "Designed a website for a café." Stronger: "Designed and built a five-page site for a local café in Figma and Webflow; the owner now updates the menu herself instead of calling a developer."
Start with a strong verb (see our resume action verbs), and if you have no number, end with a concrete outcome instead. Our guide to achievements on a resume covers honest quantifying in more depth.
Academic projects: final-year, capstone and coursework
For students, academic projects are often the strongest part of the page. Name the module or course so the reader knows it was assessed work, and give the grade if it's good. The name changes by country — final-year or major project in India, dissertation in the UK, capstone or senior design project in the US, Canada and Australia — but the entry works the same way. Three examples from different fields:
Mechanical engineering: "Final-year project: low-cost solar dryer for farm produce (team of four). Designed the airflow chamber in SolidWorks and ran heat tests on a prototype; drying time for tomato slices fell from three days in open sun to under two."
Business or commerce: "Capstone consulting project for a regional bakery chain. Analysed six months of sales by outlet in Excel and recommended dropping one loss-making product line; the client trialled the change in two outlets."
Psychology: "Dissertation: sleep and exam stress in first-year students. Designed a survey answered by 212 students, ran the analysis in SPSS and wrote the report; awarded a First."
Coursework that everyone in your class did is weaker than independent or client-facing work, so lead with the latter. Indian freshers can see how projects fit around marks and internships in our resume format for freshers, and the internship resume template shows a one-page layout with room for them.
Personal and side projects
Personal projects show initiative: nobody asked you to do them. They work best when they're clearly connected to the job and finished enough to show. A good entry says why you built it, what part is yours, and where to see it:
Software: "Built a browser extension that blocks chosen sites during set study hours; 300 users installed it from the extension store, and I fixed 12 bugs they reported."
Writing or marketing: "Started a weekly newsletter on local food businesses; grew it to 1,200 subscribers in a year through interviews and cross-posts with two community pages."
Design: "Redesigned the sign-up flow of a public library's app as a self-initiated case study; tested old and new versions with eight users and wrote up the changes in my portfolio."
Data: "Built a Power BI dashboard of my city's air quality readings, refreshed weekly from the public data portal."
Be careful with tutorial projects. A to-do app or a clone built by following a course shows you finished the course, not that you can build on your own. If you started from a tutorial, say so and name what you added: "Extended a course project with user accounts and search." Leave out abandoned projects and anything with a broken link. For technical roles, the developer resume template puts projects close to the top.
Freelance and client projects
If you've done several pieces of work for clients, don't scatter them across a Projects section. Group them under one experience entry with a clear title and date range, then use bullets for the strongest jobs:
Designed brand identities for nine small businesses, including logos, packaging and social media templates; four clients came through referrals from earlier ones.
Produced a 40-page product catalogue for a furniture maker in InDesign and delivered print-ready files a week before their trade show.
Run each job end to end: brief, schedule, two rounds of revisions and handover of source files.
This reads as a steady body of work rather than a list of odd jobs. A few more points:
Confidentiality: if a client asked not to be named, describe them instead: "a national healthcare charity" or "a fintech start-up in Bengaluru".
Overlap with a job: freelancing alongside employment can sit as its own entry with overlapping dates. That's normal; just get the dates right.
One big client: a long contract with a single client can be its own entry, titled with your role and the client's name.
Open-source work is public, so a reviewer can check every claim. That makes it strong evidence, as long as you describe it accurately. List contributions to other people's projects in their own section, often headed Open-Source Contributions, and keep your own repositories under Projects. A typical entry:
[Project name], a Python data-validation library — contributor, 2025-present
Merged 12 pull requests, including a fix for time-zone handling that closed a long-standing bug report.
Rewrote the getting-started guide and added three worked examples; the maintainers now link to it from the README.
Some guidelines:
Count what was merged, not what you opened. Mention code reviews or issue triage separately if you did a lot.
Use the right title. "Contributor" is accurate for most people; "maintainer" means you review and merge other people's work.
Non-code work counts: documentation, translation, design and testing are real contributions.
Link to the evidence, such as a filtered list of your merged pull requests, rather than just your profile.
Mentored programmes such as Google Summer of Code can go on the title line, but describe the work, not just the badge.
Upload your current resume as a PDF, Word file or photo, or start from a sample, and the AI rebuilds it in a designed template. Click any text to edit it. Projects is a standard section you can move above or below Experience; for anything without a standard heading, such as Open-Source Contributions, add a custom section with your own title. The Developer stack layout gives technical skills and projects extra prominence, and in every one of the 260 designs your text, links included, stays real and selectable. The optional AI help can tighten a project bullet or tailor the page to a job description, and the ATS score shows how readable it is for hiring software before you download the PDF.
Build a standout resume
Upload your resume and let AI rebuild it into a clean, ATS-friendly design — free to preview and download.
Above Experience if you're a student or career changer and the projects are your strongest evidence, and below it if you already have relevant jobs. Projects you did as part of a job go as bullets under that job.
How many projects should I put on my resume?
Two to four, chosen for how closely they match the job. One finished, well-described project beats five half-built ones.
Can I put personal projects on my resume?
Yes, especially for technical, design, data and writing roles. Say why you built it, which part was yours, and link to it if you can.
How do I list freelance work on a resume?
Group it under one experience entry, such as Freelance Web Developer, with dates, then use bullets for your strongest client projects. If clients are confidential, describe them by type instead of name.
Should I put a GitHub link on my resume?
Yes, if it shows work related to the job and your best repositories are pinned and documented. Write it as plain text, such as github.com/yourname, so it still works on paper.