Most CVs read best in a version of the same default order: contact details, a short summary, work experience, education, then skills and anything else, with the one common deviation being a recent graduate moving education above experience. The order matters because a reader skimming a CV for a few seconds builds an impression from whatever sits near the top, so the sections most likely to make the case for you belong there, and the order is worth choosing deliberately by career stage and target role rather than defaulting to whatever a template happened to ship with.
A common default order for most CVs
For most candidates with some paid work history, contact details and a short summary sit at the top, followed immediately by work experience in reverse-chronological order, since experience is usually the strongest evidence a mid-career or senior candidate has to offer. Education follows experience once a candidate has a few years of work behind them, since a degree earned some years ago carries less weight than what has been done since. Skills, certifications and anything else, such as a short projects section, commonly sit toward the bottom, available for a closer read but not competing with experience for the first glance.
The summary line sitting just under contact details is worth a specific mention, since its position rarely moves even when everything below it does: it stays at the very top regardless of career stage, because its job is to orient a reader before anything else is read, not to compete with experience or education for space further down. Resume summary examples covers how to write that line well once its position in the order is settled.
Reordering by career stage
A recent graduate or an early-career candidate with little paid experience commonly flips that default: education moves above experience, since it is currently the stronger evidence of the two, and a projects section often sits close behind it rather than near the bottom. As paid experience accumulates over the following years, education naturally drifts back down the page, not because it stopped mattering, but because experience has become the more persuasive section for that same reader. There is no fixed year at which the switch happens; it is worth moving education down once experience genuinely tells a stronger story than the degree alone does.
Reordering for a specific target role
Beyond career stage, the target role itself can justify moving a section up even when it would not otherwise sit near the top. A candidate applying for a role that leans heavily on a specific certification or technical skill set might move that section above education, or even close to experience, if the posting or the role itself signals that a reader will specifically be looking for it early. This is a smaller, more situational adjustment than the graduate-versus-experienced split above, worth making only when a specific application clearly calls for it rather than applied as a general rule to every version of the CV.
A career changer's order sits between the two
Someone changing careers commonly sits between the graduate order and the experienced order rather than matching either cleanly. Recent, directly relevant experience in the new field, even if it is limited, is usually worth pulling above older experience in the previous field, so a reader sees the relevant evidence first rather than having to read past several years of a different career before reaching what actually applies to this application. Older, less relevant experience does not need to disappear, it can simply sit further down the same experience section, still present but no longer occupying the first few lines a fast reader actually reads closely.
What the order signals to a fast reader
A reader skimming quickly draws conclusions from position as much as from content: whatever appears first reads as the thing the candidate considers most important, whether or not that was the intent. A CV that leads with a long, detailed skills section ahead of experience, for a candidate who actually has strong, relevant work history, undersells that experience by making a reader work further down the page to find it. Ordering sections to match where the strongest evidence for a specific application actually lives keeps that first impression aligned with the case the CV is trying to make.
Illustrative example: two orders for two experience levels
Illustrative example. A recent graduate with one internship orders their CV as: contact details, summary, education, projects, the single internship, then skills. A candidate with eight years of experience in the same field orders theirs as: contact details, summary, experience, skills, then education, with the internship-level detail long since replaced by senior work history. Both orders follow the same underlying logic, lead with whatever section currently makes the strongest case, even though the two documents look different from top to bottom.
Changing the order in the builder
Every field in the builder is editable in place, and reordering sections is one of those in-place edits: moving a section up or down changes where it sits on the page without needing to rebuild the document from scratch. That makes it reasonable to keep more than one section order in mind for different applications, adjusting the order for a specific posting rather than settling on one fixed arrangement for every version of the CV.
Build yours
Start from the default order above if you are unsure where to begin, then adjust it once career stage or a specific target role gives you a clear reason to. How to write a resume covers what belongs inside each section once the order itself is settled, and the builder is where the reordering itself happens.