A projects section lists work you built or delivered outside the framing of a job title — academic, personal, freelance, or open-source. It exists to supply evidence of capability that the work history cannot, and each entry is written to the same standard as a role.

It carries the most weight for candidates with limited formal experience, career changers building credibility in a new field, and technical roles where what you have built matters more than where you were employed. For established professionals in their own field, it is usually unnecessary.

The projects section is either the strongest thing on a resume or pure padding, with very little in between. The difference is whether each entry describes something that existed, was used, and produced a result — or whether it is a list of things you started.

When It Earns a Place

Include one when:

  • Your work history is thin. For students and graduates, projects substitute for the experience section directly — the structure is in writing a resume with no work history.
  • You are changing fields. A built artefact in the target field is the strongest evidence available that the pivot is real, ranking above coursework and certifications, as covered in writing a resume for a career change.
  • The role is technical or creative. In engineering, data, design, and writing, what you have made is assessed more directly than where you worked.
  • Your job title understates what you do. Someone titled "Analyst" who built the reporting infrastructure the whole team runs on has a story the title hides.
  • You have a gap to account for. Substantive project work during a break answers the currency question — see explaining employment gaps.

Leave it out when you have a strong relevant work history, the projects are unrelated to the target role, or the space would be better spent on quantified achievements in your actual jobs. An established professional listing a half-finished side project below ten years of relevant work is spending a section on their weakest material.

A project belongs on a resume if someone other than you used it, or if it produced a result you can state. A repository you pushed to twice is not a project — it is an intention.

Writing an Entry That Holds Up

Same anatomy as a job: a name, a context line, dates, and bullets that open with a verb and close with something measurable.

Shift Handover Tool · Personal project · Mar – Jul 2025

  • Built a web tool in Python and Postgres to replace a paper handover process across three hospital wards
  • Ran discovery with 11 nursing staff and shipped in four iterations based on their feedback
  • Adopted by two wards; cut average handover time from 25 minutes to 9 across a 40-person team

Four things are doing work there: named technology, a real problem, a described process, and an outcome with numbers. Compare it to what most projects sections contain — "Shift Handover Tool: a web application built with Python" — which describes a thing rather than an achievement.

Where a project has no adoption metric, use scale or scope instead: dataset size, number of users, hours saved, cohort reached. The categories are in quantifying achievements. State your own contribution explicitly on team projects, since everyone assumes the writer is claiming the whole thing.

Choosing Which to List

Type Worth listing when
Academic capstone or dissertation It produced something concrete and relates to the role
Personal build It is finished, usable, and ideally used by someone
Freelance or client work Almost always — this is paid work and could equally sit in experience
Open-source contribution The contribution was substantive and merged, not a documentation typo
Hackathon or competition You finished a submission; placement is a bonus, not a requirement
Internal work outside your remit It would otherwise be invisible under your job title
Tutorial follow-alongs Never — these demonstrate that you can follow instructions

Two or three entries is the right number for most resumes. A list of eight signals that no filtering was applied and buries the two that matter. Order by relevance to the specific role, not by date — the same per-application reordering covered in tailoring to a job description.

A link is worth including when it leads somewhere that supports the claim, and actively harmful when it does not.

  • Check it works before every application. A dead link is worse than no link.
  • Link to the specific thing, not a profile homepage. A recruiter will not go hunting through repositories to find the project you mentioned.
  • Make sure the destination is presentable. An empty README, a broken demo, or a repository last touched in 2022 undercuts the entry it was meant to support.
  • Use plain text URLs or linked text, not icons. Text inside a graphic is not extractable, which is one of the parsing issues covered in making a resume machine-readable.
  • Keep client work confidential where required. "Built a demand forecasting model for a national retailer" describes the work without breaching an agreement.
  • One portfolio link in the contact line is usually better than a link per entry, unless individual projects live in different places.

One last check: a projects section should not duplicate your experience section. If a project was done inside a job, it belongs in that role's bullets rather than as a separate entry — the allocation logic is in listing work experience. The exception is internal work so far outside your title that a reader would otherwise miss it.

If you are unsure whether your projects are reading as relevant experience for a particular role, running the resume against the posting shows whether their vocabulary matches what the employer is looking for. The free resume builder includes a projects section by default. Both tools are at FixResume, with credit options on the pricing page.

Common Questions About Projects on a Resume

Should I include personal projects on my resume?

Include them when your work history is thin, when you are changing fields, or when the role is technical or creative and what you have built is assessed directly. Leave them out when you have strong relevant experience and the space would be better spent on quantified achievements from actual jobs.

How many projects should I list?

Two or three for most resumes, ordered by relevance to the specific role rather than by date. A longer list signals that no filtering was applied and buries the entries that matter. One genuinely strong project with an outcome beats five described only by the technology used.

Do unfinished projects count?

Generally no. A project earns its place when it exists, works, and ideally was used by someone other than you, since that is what turns it from an intention into evidence. If a project is genuinely in progress and substantial, say so explicitly rather than implying completion.

Where should the projects section go?

Directly above work experience when projects are your strongest evidence, which applies to students, graduates, and career changers. Below work experience for established professionals where it is supporting material. For technical roles it often sits between skills and experience.

Should I link to my project?

Yes, provided the link works and the destination is presentable, and link to the specific project rather than a profile homepage. A dead link or an empty repository actively undermines the entry. Use plain text or linked text rather than icons, since text inside a graphic is not extractable.

Can I list projects I did at work?

Normally they belong in that role's bullet points rather than as separate entries, since duplicating them makes the resume look padded. The exception is substantial work well outside your job title, which a reader would otherwise never know about because the title conceals it.