Electrician Resume Example & Writing Guide

You like working with your hands, in different environments, and solving problems. Great! You chose a career that allows you to do those things as an electrician. Plus, demand for your skills is growing. With a well-crafted electrician resume, you can have your pick of jobs. 

You don't have to do it alone. Writing and formatting a resume can be a frustrating and time consuming activity and you want to get your job hunt going now. Consider taking advantage of Resume.io and its job-search resources,: its builder tool and expertly designed templates. In less than 15 minutes, you will learn from this guide:

• What an electrician does, in the context of your job search
• How to ensure your resume gets past the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) filter
• The best format for an electrician resume
• How to impress hiring managers in each resume section: summary, work history, education, skills)
• How to choose a clean, legible design

What does an electrician do?

Skilled trades workers are in demand. Get the job you desire by presenting yourself in the best light. One of the benefits of being an electrician is that you don’t have to sit at a desk all day. You will be working hard, however. Most electricians work full time — and are even paid overtime — because they are in demand and they need to make deadlines. Evening and weekend work is common.

Working conditions

No matter the economy, electricians are needed, so you have job security. You also have job variety. You won’t be going to the same place or solving the same problems every day. Each job will offer something new. You also have the freedom to be your own boss or work for someone else.

Often, electricians are working outside, without heating or air conditioning but with some type of weather cover. They may be exposed to dangerous conditions, such as live wires or be working at construction sites where building hazards and large equipment pose safety concerns. Noise levels may be high or distracting. Safety equipment, such as goggles and gloves, are a must at all times. When working within homes and buildings, you may have to crawl or squeeze into tight spaces and stay there while you complete repairs or upgrades. Lighting may be bad as well. Electricians also may spend long hours in a vehicle commuting to a job site. Consider highlighting your ability to work in different conditions when describing yourself in the resume.

The options

Not all electricians do the same work. Here are some specializations to choose from: 

Electrical contractor: This is a great choice if you want to be your own boss and like supervising others. They usually work with the customer, place bids for work, and hire other electricians to complete jobs.

Residential electrician: These tradespeople work in homes and small apartment buildings. They install, maintain, and repair wiring and electrical systems.

Commercial electrician: To work in large commercial buildings, you need apprenticeship hours in a commercial setting because the type of power is different from residential power.

Industrial electrician: The environment in this field is power plants, factories, chemical plants, and other industrial buildings. This requires training under a licensed industrial electrician.

 If you are looking to specialize, make sure you target your resume toward electricians under whom you can get your training hours.

How to write an electrician resume

The very first step in writing your electrician resume is understanding what sections to include. Your CV should contain the following elements:

• The resume summary (also known as profile or personal statement)
• The employment history section
• The education section
• The resume skills section

What a powerful electrician resume has in common with resumes for any other occupation is that the style, tone, and message should be geared to the person you are communicating with. In this instance it’s an employer — perhaps a company hiring manager or project contractor. 

Investigate everything you can about the job you are applying for: who you are working for and with, and the job site. Especially try to put a name and a face to the hiring manager and whoever will be your boss if it’s not the same person. Write your resume as if you are answering interview questions that haven’t been asked yet. 

But at a much earlier stage in the hiring process, your resume must get past the ATS used by most medium and large companies. The ATS scans your resume looking for keywords that hiring managers list as important. If your formatting is faulty, the ATS may not be able to read important information, including those keywords. Hiring managers like this software because it limits the number of resumes they have to read. Make sure yours gets into their hands by keeping formatting clean. More on keywords later.

Stick to this winning formula:

• Write every word with the specific employer or client in mind, as well as the specialty area and project type. Adapt the style and tone as you would communicating in person.
• Convey a dependable, confident image visually with a resume template and design that is neat and orderly without being too formal or stuffy.
• When submitting online, optimize your resume with appropriate keywords so it won’t be filtered out by ATS screening software.

Choosing the best resume format for an electrician

The most commonly used chronological resume format works well for job seekers in almost any occupation, particularly if their work history has followed a linear path. In that section of your electrician resume , progressive job experience and accomplishments are organized by employer / workplace in reverse order from most recent to earliest dates. It would likely be a good fit for most electrician job applicants who already have experience in this field or perhaps in another building trade.

Alternative resume formats are sometimes appropriate for those new to the workforce or changing careers or those with a more varied occupational background. That includes some self-employed professionals with a project-based background well suited to a “functional” resume format. Other functional resumes emphasize specialized technical skills, rather than work history. In some instances, a hybrid (combination) work history makes sense in adapting chronological and functional elements.

Electrician CV summary example

Your summary gives an overview of your professional life and attributes. This is your space to put some personality into your electrician resume. All your other sections must be brief and focused on your achievements. You definitely want to tell employers what you have accomplished already as an electrician, but you can also tell them a little about yourself by using words that describe your professional personality. 

This section is also known as a profile and is not the place to be modest. Be proud of your talents!

While the summary section of your electrician resume allows you some freedom, you can’t get too wordy. You have two to four sentences to explain what skills and attributes you will bring to the business. Here are some questions to ask yourself before you begin to write this section:

• What challenging electrical problems have I solved and how?
• How do I relate to customers?
• Do I excel at certain desired skills and can I illustrate them by telling about a project I completed?
• How would my coworkers describe my professional demeanor?
• Which traits are valuable to an employer? Think about reliability, efficiency, teamwork, and other non-technical skills.

This is a good spot to get in some keywords, too. Look at the job ad and highlight any skills or attributes the employer has listed. Try to fit at least a few of them in here. Don’t force it! Pick the ones you want to emphasize. There’s plenty of time to add others later. The key is to grab the attention of hiring managers so they feel compelled to grant you an interview.

Employment history sample

Whether you are just starting out or have been in the workforce for years, you have accomplishments and growth to show here. A winning electrician resume tells hiring managers not only what you have done, but how you have learned and grown on the job. 

As an electrician, you completed an apprenticeship. Show how that gave you foundational skills and then illustrate your increasing abilities in later jobs. Your employment history focuses on your achievements and the challenges you have overcome. You didn’t just replace faulty wiring, you listened as the customer described the problem, investigated and performed tests, diagnosed the problem, developed one or more solutions, communicated those to the customer, and repaired the electrical system on time and within budget.

Use strong action verbs like the ones above to describe your work. Be as detailed as possible, within reason and a one-page space limit. Exactly what electrical systems have you repaired? If you have data such as a customer satisfaction rating, put that in!

Keywords for the employment history section can come from a master list of skills and/or a word cloud app, as explained below regarding the skills section of your resume

You do not need to list a skill that you repeated in more than one job, especially if they are foundational skills. Try to present a picture of increasing responsibility or technical knowledge. This section should also be specific to the job for which you are applying. Emphasize the skills the employer wants. You can do this by changing the order in which you list skills or by switching them up completely to fit the job requirements.

Electrician resume education section

You need a high school diploma or GED, but your apprenticeship and licenses count for a lot here. You have a choice: You can list your apprenticeship in the employment history section of your electrician resume or you can list it here. 

This may depend on how much other experience you have. If you are in mid-career, your apprenticeship is less important than your later jobs. If you are searching for your first post-apprenticeship job, put that experience in your employment history section. As you gain more experience, you can move it down.

Include your high school diploma or GED. If you have any higher degree or a vocational or technical school degree, list that too. You may want to consider adding a License section if you have more than one license. Remember that each state has different requirements, so be sure to say exactly what license you have and where it is from. All states specify an apprenticeship, usually of four years. You may also have to pass a test. 

After you have completed your apprenticeship, you can apply to be a journeyman licensed electrician and then choose to get further training. If you have done so, add that to this section or your license section. The same is true if you have become a master electrician.  

Skills example section

This listing gives hiring managers a brief overview of your abilities and allows you to add some all-important keywords. You already highlighted keywords from the job ad you targeted for your summary. Now, you will use those words in a listing of your skills. 

Sometimes, keywords aren’t obvious because the job listing is vague or too detailed. In that case, you can create a word cloud. Word clouds take text and turn them into images. The more the word appears in the text, the bigger it is in the image. All you have to do is plug job listing descriptions into an app such as wordle.com or wordart.com and you will get a visual representation of the words that the ATS is probably scanning for.

Skills employers want

Here are the top four skills you need to be an electrician, according to ActionGroup Staffing, which recruits skilled tradespeople: 

1. Technical ability: It may seem obvious, but to have a great resume you need to demonstrate that you know how electrical machines and systems work.
2. Customer attentiveness: Excellent listening skills and quick responses to customers are a must. Most customers will not understand electrical systems. It will be your job to explain to them what is wrong and what their options for fixing it are. They will rely on you as the expert for explanation and advice.
3. Team-player and independent worker: You may be working as part of a team on a big job or independently on smaller jobs. You need to have the ability to do your best work in both situations.
4. Problem-solving: You won’t simply be following blueprints. Many of your jobs will require you to diagnose the problem and find a way to fix it.

These broad categories can be broken down into more detailed skills. For instance, instead of saying “customer attentiveness,” you can list “detailed explanations to customers” or “prompt response to questions.” Try to use a blend of hard skills, or the distinct technical knowledge you need to be an electrician, and soft skills, or the interpersonal skills it takes to get along with colleagues and customers and to function well in a work environment. Pick the top five or ten skills from each job listing and put them in this section. Each job is a little different, so you need to tailor your resume to fit.

Resume layout and design

Just as you want the words on your resume to convey a professional image, so should your layout. Your layout is almost as important as the skills and accomplishments you will describe. If it looks sloppy or hard-to-read, you could easily get passed over for that job you’ve been dreaming about. There are some basic design rules you can follow to ensure that doesn’t happen to you, but you can also use the layout formats that resume.io has tested with professional recruiters and hiring managers.

Those layouts are customizable, but let’s look at key strategies to keep your resume recruiter-friendly:

• Stay away from too much color or fancy fonts
• Vary text length to eliminate big blocks of text
• Place your contact information somewhere easy to see
• Use bullet points instead of long sentences
• Don’t put information into headers or footers that may not be scannable by application software.

Jumbled formatting, spacing, or clashing colors are all reasons recruiters will reject your resume. Formatting is important. Remember that carefully aligned columns, bulleted lists, and other formatting can get garbled when they go from one program to another. Always save your resume as a PDF file and double-check that the formatting has remained exactly the way you envisioned it. 

The formatting of your electrician resume is a concern for more than just visual reasons. But you don't have to worry about any of those potential issues with resume.io's builder tool and recruiter-tested templates. They have been created to help you look your best and avoid costly mistakes. With four layout template categories to choose from, you are sure to find the right design to highlight your personality and professional accomplishments.

Key takeaways for an electrician resume

1. Keep the layout clean and formatting perfect.
2. Use keywords in your summary, skills, and employment history sections to beat the ATS.
3. Impress with your accomplishments and career growth.
4. Use resume.io, its resume builder tool, and resume layout templates to develop a resume that will take you to the next level!