How to include additional information on a resume

Once your experience, education, and skills are in place, you are left with a handful of extras that do not fit neatly anywhere else: certifications, languages, volunteer work, publications, awards. Handled well, an additional information section turns these loose ends into genuine differentiators. Handled badly, it becomes filler that dilutes a strong resume. This guide explains what belongs there, what to leave off, and how to format it.

What is the additional information section on a resume?

The additional information section is an optional block, usually near the bottom of the resume, where you list relevant details that strengthen your candidacy but do not belong under experience or education. It is a catch-all by design, which makes editorial discipline essential — every line has to earn its place.

The guiding test is relevance. If an item supports your case for the specific role, it belongs. If it is merely true about you, it probably does not. A second language is an asset for a customer-facing role; your interest in hiking rarely is, unless the employer has signalled that culture fit matters.

What to include in additional information

Some categories consistently add value across industries. The table below shows the most common ones and when each is worth listing.

Technical skills and tools sometimes live here too, though for most roles they are better placed in a dedicated skills block. For a structured approach to that section, see our guide on how to describe your professional skills.

What to leave off your resume

Knowing what to exclude is just as important as knowing what to add. The following almost never help and can actively hurt:

• Personal data. Age, marital status, religion, and a photo invite bias and are unnecessary in most markets.
• Irrelevant hobbies. Generic interests like “reading” or “travelling” tell a recruiter nothing useful.
• Outdated or expired credentials. A lapsed certification raises questions rather than confidence.
• References or “references available on request.” Both waste space; employers ask when they need them.
• Salary expectations. Keep these out of the resume entirely — handle them where appropriate, as we explain in our guide to including salary requirements in a cover letter.

How to decide what makes the cut

Use a simple filter for every candidate item. Run each one through these checks before it goes on the page.

If an item clears all four checks, it belongs in your additional information section. If it fails even one, cut it. This keeps the section lean and ensures every entry pulls its weight.

How to format the additional information section

Formatting should be clean and scannable. A few practical rules keep this section from looking like an afterthought:

Use clear subheadings or labels

Group like items together — “Certifications,” “Languages,” “Volunteer Experience” — rather than listing everything in one undifferentiated block. Labelled groups let a recruiter find what matters in a glance.

Keep entries short and consistent

One line per item is usually enough. Match the punctuation, capitalisation, and date format you use elsewhere on the resume so the section feels integrated rather than tacked on.

Make it ATS-safe

Avoid burying credentials inside graphics, tables, or columns that an applicant tracking system may not parse. Plain text with standard headings is safest — the same principle that underpins our guide on writing an ATS-friendly resume.

Examples of strong additional information entries

Seeing the section done well makes the standard concrete. Compare a vague entry with a sharpened one and the difference is obvious.

Languages — weak: “Good with languages.” Strong: “Spanish (professional working proficiency), French (conversational).” Specific proficiency levels let an employer judge fit without guessing.

Volunteer work — weak: “Volunteer at local charity.” Strong: “Treasurer, Riverside Food Bank (2022–present) — manage a 90,000 GBP annual budget and report to a board of seven.” The stronger version surfaces a transferable, quantified skill.

Certifications — weak: “Various IT certifications.” Strong: “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (2024); CompTIA Security+ (2023).” Named, dated credentials are verifiable and signal currency.

Awards — weak: “Won several awards at work.” Strong: “Employee of the Year 2024 (selected from 380 staff); President’s Club, top 2% of national sales force.” Quantifying the field you beat turns a soft brag into a credible distinction.

Publications and speaking — weak: “Have spoken at conferences.” Strong: “Keynote, UK FinTech Summit 2024 (audience of 600); two peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of Applied Data Science.” Naming the venue and scale lets a recruiter gauge the level of recognition without contacting you.

How to phrase entries that pull double duty

The strongest additional-information lines do two jobs at once: they state a fact and they hint at a competency the employer is screening for. A language entry is not just proof of fluency — for a customer-success role it signals you can support an international client base. A volunteer treasurer line is not just community spirit — it is evidence of financial stewardship and board-level communication. When you draft each entry, ask which underlying skill it demonstrates and make sure the phrasing surfaces it. “Mentored four junior developers through a coding bootcamp” reads very differently to a hiring manager filling a team-lead role than “volunteered at a bootcamp,” even though the underlying activity is identical. The same discipline that makes a work-history bullet land applies here: name the action, the scale, and the outcome. For the mechanics of turning activities into proof, our guide on how to describe your relevant experience on a resume translates directly to this section.

Additional information by industry

What belongs in this section shifts with the field. A line that is essential on a healthcare resume can be irrelevant on a creative one. The table below maps the highest-value extras to common sectors so you can prioritise quickly.

Some specialised fields treat extras as core rather than optional. On a federal resume, clearances, hours-per-week, and supervisory details are mandatory data points, not afterthoughts. On an academic CV, publications and grants often occupy more space than employment itself. Read the conventions of your target field before deciding how much weight to give the section.

A four-step process for building the section

If you are starting from a blank page, work through it methodically rather than trying to recall everything at once.

1. Brain-dump everything. List every certification, language, award, publication, membership, and volunteer role you hold, without filtering. The goal here is recall, not judgement.
2. Score each item against the role. Run every entry through the relevance-recency-credibility-distinctiveness filter from the diagram above. Mark each as keep, maybe, or cut.
3. Group and label the survivors. Cluster the “keep” items under clear headings — Certifications, Languages, Volunteer Experience — and order the groups by relevance to the job.
4. Sharpen the phrasing. Rewrite each surviving line so it names a level, a date, or a number. “Fluent in Spanish” becomes “Spanish (professional working proficiency)”; “volunteer” becomes “Treasurer, managing a 90,000 GBP budget.”

This sequence keeps you from two opposite failure modes: the resume that dumps everything indiscriminately, and the one that omits a genuinely differentiating credential because you forgot you had it.

How much space should it take?

For most candidates, additional information is a compact block — three to six lines, rarely more than a quarter of the final section of the page. It is a supporting act, not a headliner, so it should never push your experience or skills below the fold. The main exceptions are credential-heavy and research-heavy fields: a nurse with multiple specialist certifications, or an academic with a substantial publication record, will legitimately give the section more room. The test is always proportional value. If an extra line genuinely strengthens your case for the specific role, it earns its space; if it is there to fill the page, cut it. A resume that ends with confident white space reads as more senior than one padded to the margins with low-value extras — a principle that runs through our roundup of the nine deadly mistakes in resume writing.

Where to place additional information on the page

For most candidates this section sits near the bottom, after experience, education, and skills. There are exceptions. If a certification or license is a hard requirement for the role — a nursing license, a security clearance, a CPA — surface it higher, even in your summary, so it is impossible to miss. Let the importance of the item to the specific employer dictate its position.

A useful way to think about placement is to picture a recruiter’s six-second scan. They read top to bottom and stop the moment they have decided. Anything genuinely decisive for the role — a mandatory license, a clearance, a rare language the job explicitly requires — needs to appear before that decision is made, which usually means the summary or a line directly under it. Everything that is merely supportive can wait until the bottom of the page, where it rewards the reader who has already decided you are worth a closer look. The mistake is treating the section as a fixed slot. It is a flexible pool of evidence, and individual items should migrate up or down based on how much they matter to the specific employer in front of you.

Before and after: a full section makeover

It helps to see an entire section rebuilt, not just isolated lines. Below is a weak additional-information block followed by the same candidate’s reworked version for a project-management role.

Before: “Interests: reading, travel, football. Languages: Spanish, a bit of French. Volunteer at local events. Various certifications. References available on request.” This block fails on every count — generic interests, vague proficiency, unquantified volunteering, unnamed certifications, and a wasted references line.

After:

• Certifications: PRINCE2 Practitioner (2024); Scrum Master (PSM I, 2023)
• Languages: Spanish (professional working proficiency)
• Volunteer experience: Project lead, town carnival committee — coordinated 30 volunteers and a 25,000 GBP budget across a six-month timeline

The reworked version is shorter yet far stronger. Every line now names a credential, a level, or a number, and the volunteer entry doubles as direct evidence of the project-coordination skill the role demands. The references line and the generic interests are gone, freeing space and reading as more confident. Notice too that the three surviving categories are ordered by relevance to the target role: certifications first because they map most directly onto a project-management posting, languages second, volunteering last. That ordering is itself a small signal of judgement — it tells the recruiter you know which of your extras matters most for their vacancy. This is the standard to aim for: a tight, labelled block where a recruiter could not delete a single line without losing relevant information, and where the very first item they read is the one most likely to advance your case. If you would like an expert eye on whether your own extras are pulling their weight, you can request a free resume review and a senior writer will flag anything that is diluting the page.

Additional information do’s and don’ts

This checklist captures the judgement calls that separate a section that adds value from one that just adds length.