Listing Awards On Your Resume
Kent R.
If you've got awards that you can include on your resume (e.g. corporate recognition, military honors, academic awards, etc.), excellent (and congratulations!). Awards and honors are great ways to differentiate yourself and leverage the recognition of others to highlight your success. However, there are some things you should be aware of when deciding when and how to include awards and honors on your resume.
Share details – Your Somebody's Name Award of Excellence or STAR Award for Outstanding Achievement are meaningless to readers without context. When listing these kinds of awards on your resume, make sure to provide readers with some critical context, such why you specifically earned the award. Did you exceed sales goals? Did you over-deliver on a project? Did you optimize a process? The reason why you earned an award is far more important to readers than the name of the award.
Keep them recent – Honors and awards can have diminishing returns, so consider the amount of time that has passed since you received the recognition and consider allowing older awards to age off of your resume. This is especially important if you are listing older awards and no recent awards, which can make it appear that your best days are behind you
Provide context – A lot of resumes include an Awards and Honors section (or something similar). That is fine, but I recommend listing your awards in line with the experience that they are related to. This provides readers with more context and can help to keep awards from feeling disconnected from the rest of your experience (in the minds of readers).