How To Put Research On Your Resume (With Examples)

Research experiences and skills are an incredibly important aspect of many job applications. Without research, the ability to innovate as a company is stunted. Therefore, hiring managers and recruiters want employees who can help drive innovation by being able to apply research skills to problem solve and come up with creative growth solutions.

Knowing how to use these skills as leverage to make your resume stand out is a great way to help you land your dream job. Even if you don’t have any traditional research experience, think about the skills that are used in research and highlight how you’ve used those skills in past jobs.

Key Takeaways:

• If you don’t have traditional research experience, highlight the skills used for research that you’ve used in past jobs.

• Consider creating a separate research section in your resume if you have a lot of research experience or merge sections, depending on which section you want to bolster with research.

• Research experience is one of the best assets to include on a resume so be on the lookout for more opportunities.

What Are Research Skills?

Research skills are any skills related to your ability to locate, extract, organize, and evaluate data relevant to a particular subject. It also involves investigation, critical thinking, and presenting or using the findings in a meaningful way.

Depending on what job you’re applying for, research skills could make or break your ability to land the job. Almost every job requires some research skills and you probably already have some of those skills mastered by now.

If you don’t believe it, think about it. A copywriter needs to be able to fact check what she is writing. A daycare manager needs to be able to research new childcare policies. An entrepreneur has to be able to understand current market demands.

For most careers, research is a vital process to be able to answer questions. “Research skills” are not a single skill, but multiple ones put together.

Some skills that are necessary for research are organization, problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, and specific technical skills, like coding, Excel, and copywriting.

Here are examples of research skills in action that you may have overlooked:

• Searching for local business competition

• Sending out customer satisfaction surveys

• Summarizing current policies and laws in effect for a particular topic

• Creating lesson plans based on current education standards

• Reading literature reviews and implementing changes in clinical practice

Where to Put Research Experience on Your Resume

You are probably wondering which section you should include your research experience and skills in your resume.

Including research experience and skills on a resume can be incredibly flexible. When thinking about how to add it to your resume, you want to consider how the research experience adds to your resume.

Does it help you showcase deliverables for your work history section? Or does it help showcase your education? Do you have several publications because of your research?

The answer to these questions will guide how you include your research experience on a resume.

If you’ve had smaller research roles but no “official” research experience, you can highlight the skills associated with the types of research mentioned above in your job description under your work history section in your resume.

If your job history is a research position, then naturally, you would include research under the work history section. You can also merge your sections depending on what type of position you are applying for.

For example, you could create a “Research and Education” section or a “Research and Publications” section. If your research is not related to your education and you don’t have any publications, you can also detail it out in a separate “Research” section in your resume.

How to Include Research on Your Resume

Now that you have decided which section you will include your research experience and skills in, you will want to know how to present that information. Adding research to a resume is very similar to adding past work experiences to your work history section.

The first step is to collect all of the important details like the title of the research project, location of the research project, principal investigator of the project (if applicable), and the dates of the project. You will list these details much like you would list a company you have worked for in the past.

When describing your role on the project, you will want to summarize your accomplishments and deliverables. Hiring managers and recruiters love seeing numbers. When you write out the deliverables from your project, make sure you quantify them.

You should also include publications, conferences you may have presented at, and any awards or recognition your research had received.

If you have completed research in an academic setting, then presentations (oral and poster) are an important part of the research process. You should include those details along with the titles of your publications.

Other aspects of research that you can detail out to make your application more competitive are adding skills specific to your project to your skills section of your resume.

These skills will vary depending on the subject matter, but some examples include coding languages, interviewing skills, any software you used and are proficient in using, managerial skills, and public speaking if you have presented your research at conferences.

Examples of Research on a Resume

Let’s look at some examples of how research can be included on a resume:

1. Example 1: University Research

   EDUCATION

   Undergraduate Thesis, University of Connecticut, Dec. 2017-May 2018

   Worked alongside UCONN English Department head Penelope Victeri to research the poetry of New England writers of the 20th century. Explored common themes across the works of Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell.

   • Performed online and in-person research on historical documents relating to each author, including information on the political, religious, and economic landscape of the US at the time.

   • Analyzed poetic works of each author and drew on similar contemporary regional authors’ works.

   • Prepared 20,000 words thesis entitled “Place, Allegory, and Religion: Three 20th Century New England Poets” and defended my written arguments to a panel of English professors.

2. Example 2: Customer Service Research

   WORK EXPERIENCE

   • Conducted interviews with 20 customers each week to gain insight into the user experience with company products

   • Used Google analytics to determine which pages were driving most web traffic, and increased traffic by 11%

   • Reviewed thousands of customer surveys and compiled findings into monthly reports with graphic findings

   • Presented at weekly marketing meeting to inform marketing team of trends in customer experience with our products

3. Example 3: Laboratory Research

   RESEARCH

   • Contucted experiments on rat brains by introducing various novel chemical compounds and levels of oxygen

   • Ran electricity through brain slices to view interaction of different chemical compounds on active brain cells

   • Prepared sterile samples for daily check and maintained 89% percent yield over the course of a 3-month study

   • Presented findings in a final 15-page research report and presentation to the Research and Development team

Tips for Inlcuding Research on Your Resume

Here are some final tips for including research on your resume:

• Read the job description carefully. Every resume and cover letter you write should be tailored for the job you’re applying for. When a hiring manager puts a necessary qualification in their job posting, you must be sure to include it in your resume.

  Make sure that you highlight the right types of research skills on your job applications and resumes.

• Quantify your research when possible. Some research is hard to quantify, but if you conducted any research where numbers played a big role, bring those numbers into your resume. Recruiters and hiring managers want to see what impact you had on your research project.

• Add research to your skills section. If the specific research you did is less important than the skills you used to perform it, highlight that in your skills section. That way, you don’t have to take up a lot of work or education history with slightly irrelevant information, but hiring managers can still see you have research skills.

  Just be sure you’re more specific about a research methodology you’re an expert in because the skills section doesn’t give you as much room to explain how you leveraged these abilities.

• Sprinkle research throughout your resume. If you have a lot of experience performing research in professional, volunteer, and educational settings, pepper it in a few different sections. The more hands-on experience you have with research, the better (for jobs that require research).

Author

Heidi Cope

Heidi Cope is a former writer for the Zippia Career Advice blog. Her writing focused primarily on Zippia's suite of rankings and general career advice. After leaving Zippia, Heidi joined The Mighty as a writer and editor, among other positions. She received her BS from UNC Charlotte in German Studies.