Resumes for Mid-Level and Senior Professionals: Expert Tips & Templates
Ready to land your next big role? Learn how to write a powerful resume as a mid-level or senior professional that showcases your leadership, on-the-job results, and skills.
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Climbing the career ladder comes with new challenges, and your resume needs to keep up. When you're a mid-level manager eyeing your next promotion or a senior executive ready for a strategic leap, your resume needs to reflect your accomplished career and the skills necessary to level up.
Employers at this level are looking for clear evidence of leadership, measurable results, and a story of growth. To help you impress hiring managers, leverage our expert resume-writing advice, and resume examples and templates built specifically for professionals like you, so you can stand out in a crowded market and position yourself as the high-impact leader companies want to hire.
Ready to take the next step? Craft your most compelling resume with the help of pre-written suggestions and professionally-designed templates in our top-rated Resume Builder!
What Makes Mid-Level & Senior Resumes Different?
Resumes at the mid-level and senior stages need to go beyond listing responsibilities. A great mid-level resume showcases your career growth, and a senior level resume is packed with relevant quantifiable achievements.
At this level, hiring managers want to see how you've driven outcomes, led teams, and shaped business decisions. Your resume should tell the story of your career growth and value.
Key Differences
- Leadership and influence:
Go beyond individual contributions. Highlight your experience leading teams, mentoring others, managing cross-functional projects, or influencing executive decisions. - Business impact:
Employers want proof that you’ve made the business thrive. Highlight quantifiable results such as cost savings, revenue growth, and efficiency improvements, backed by numbers whenever possible. - Strategic focus:
Emphasize big-picture thinking. For example, mention how you shaped departmental strategies, enacted organizational change, or contributed to long-term company goals. - Concise, tailored summary:
Open with a powerful resume summary that frames who you are, what you bring to the job, and what you’re aiming for in your career. Focus on your leadership style and provide a strong value proposition. - Curated work experience:
Be intentional about what you include. Focus on roles from the last 10 to 15 years that demonstrate high-level responsibilities and how you’ve moved up. Feel free to omit entry-level positions unless they’re essential to your story.
The goal at this stage of your career isn’t just to prove you’re qualified; you’ve got to show that you’re ready to lead and deliver results at a higher level.
Resume Examples for Mid-Level and Senior Professionals
If you’re in need of inspiration, take a look at these mid-level and senior-level resume examples tailored for in-demand jobs. Click on your favorite template to edit it in our Resume Builder.
Senior marketing executive
Why this resume works:
- There's a quantifiable accomplishment in every role listed in the work history section — for example, "25% revenue increase" — which clearly demonstrates the candidate’s effectiveness and impact on the business.
- Shows career growth by outlining a logical progression from Head of Digital Marketing to Senior Marketing Executive, with increasing responsibilities like managing up to 15 team members and budgets up to $5 million, which reinforces their leadership skills as well.
- A strong emphasis on digital expertise backed by certifications proves the candidate is more than an entry-level professional and has the skills to thrive in an evolving industry like marketing.
Senior medical and health manager
Why this resume works:
- The reverse-chronological format clearly shows a steady, long-term career within the healthcare field, with multi-year tenures at each organization, which builds credibility and trust.
- The resume combines soft skills (strategic communication, teamwork) with hard skills (regulatory compliance, KPI reporting), presenting the candidate as both people-oriented and data-driven — a key combination in senior healthcare roles.
- A strong use of action-oriented language, such as, "reduce," "manage," and "implement," immediately signal the various accomplishments in this candidate's career.
Senior data scientist
Why this resume works:
- The professional summary immediately grabs attention by highlighting the candidate's experience and, most importantly, quantifiable achievements right at the top, setting a strong tone for the rest of the resume.
- The resume utilizes clear headings, bullet points, and concise language, making it easy for a recruiter or hiring manager to quickly scan and identify key information.
- The two-column template in this combination resume allows the candidate to place emphasis on their impressive higher education and relevant certifications, proving their skills are up to par with their experience.
Information security analyst
Why this resume works:
- The well-curated skills section at the top immediately signals to hiring managers this candidate is aptly prepared for the job, before moving on to establish a solid work history.
- Key qualifications (e.g., vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, threat detection tools) are integrated into work history achievements, beyond the dedicated skills section.
- A section for certifications helps the candidate add more weight to their education qualifications beyond their bachelor's degree.
Physician assistant
Why this resume works:
- While not explicitly listing "leadership" job titles, achievements like "Lead a patient flow initiative" and "Implemented a telemedicine program" demonstrate leadership potential and a proactive approach.
- Relevant certifications coupled with a Master of Science in Physician Assistant Practice reinforces this candidate's strong educational and professional foundation, covering basic requirements for a promotion.
- An achievements-packed summary listing various qualifications such as years of experience, key areas of expertise, and measurable accomplishments shows the candidate has tapped all their potential and is ready for the next stage.
Best Resume Structure for Mid-Level & Senior Roles
How you structure your resume sections will vary depending on your level of experience. As a mid-level or senior-level professional, you want a resume format that showcases your years of experience as well as your wide range of skills.
Out of the three recruiter-approved resume formats, we recommend the combination and chronological formats for mid- and senior-level applicants.
Best resume format for mid-level professionals
The ideal resume format for mid-level professionals is the combination format, which, as the name suggests, is a hybrid of the more experience-centered chronological format and the skills-based functional resume.
The combination resume format helps mid-level professionals show employers they’ve developed the necessary skill set to move up in their career while still showcasing their accomplished work history.
The combination resume consists of the following sections:
- Contact information
- Professional summary or resume objective
- Summary of qualifications (optional)
- Skills
- Work experience
- Education
Best resume format for senior-level professionals
On the other hand, senior job seekers would benefit more from the classic chronological resume, especially if you have extensive relevant experience.
As a general rule, if you have 10 or more years of relevant work experience, you should opt for the chronological resume format. This recruiter-favorite layout showcases your career growth and accomplishments by focusing on the work history section.
Here are the key sections for a chronological resume, in this order:
- Contact information
- Professional summary
- Work experience
- Skills
- Education
You can find a more in-depth explanation of what to include in each resume section in our How to Write a Resume guide.
Resume Tips for Mid-Level and Senior-Level Professionals
- Tailor your resume for each job. Instead of treating your resume as a one-size-fits-all document you use for all job applications, customize it to the target job. You don’t have to write a brand new resume each time, but tweaking key details like job-relevant skills and choosing achievements that relate to the job requirements will help you stand out to employers.
- Open with a strong resume summary. Because it’s the first section hiring managers see, the professional summary is another section that should be tailored to each job. This section is great for showing you meet essential qualifications such as education level, years of experience, and areas of expertise.
- Focus on results instead of job duties. A common mistake job seekers make is listing responsibilities versus accomplishments. If you only mention your daily tasks, employers won’t be able to differentiate you from other candidates. They already have an idea of your day to day based on your job title; give them added value by focusing on what you accomplished and the impact it had on the company.
- Show career progression. Take advantage of your work experience section to show employers how you’ve grown throughout your career. Try to tailor your work history achievements to show that you’ve overcome challenges and are constantly updating your skills.
- Use action-oriented language. A simple but effective tip to capture hiring managers’ attention is to begin each resume accomplishment with a strong action verb. Avoid passive voice and first person pronouns like “I” and “my,” and use words that immediately inform employers what you achieved, i.e., “improved,” “increased,” “led,” and “spearheaded.”
- Incorporate keywords from the job description. Browse the job ad for repeated skills and qualifications of high-relevance to the employer and add them to your resume. These are called resume keywords and they help you tailor your resume to the role and optimize it for applicant tracking systems (ATS).
PRO TIP
Common Resume Mistakes to Avoid
- Overloading with outdated experience: You don’t need to include every job since college. Focus on the most relevant 10-15 years that reflect seniority and strategic impact.
- Overly long or dense formatting: A resume that's hard to skim will likely make the hiring manager skip it. The ideal resume length for mid-level and senior-level professionals is one to two pages. Include clear headings, use a clean, readable resume font, and have ample white space to balance out your content
- Listing every tool or technology you have mastered: Mid/senior professionals should be selective with the technical skills they include in a resume. Highlight tools that are advanced or a key job requirement, not an encyclopedia of all you know.
- Unnecessary pronouns and filler words: Omit unneeded pronouns like “I,” “he,” “she,” and filler words like “a,” “an,” and “the” to make your resume concise and professional.
Should You Hire a Resume Writer?
If you want to level up in your career and stand out in a competitive job market, a professional resume writer can provide the expertise you need.
At LiveCareer, we want to provide you with all the tools you need to make a standout resume, whether that’s a correctly formatted resume template, a top-rated Resume Builder, or one-on-one professional guidance.
Mid-level or senior professionals that have a lot of experience and skill (and a busy schedule!) will find our professional resume writing services to be a worthy investment.
How it works
- Choose one of our three resume writing packages that best suits your experience level. Our “Professional” and “Executive” packages are suitable for mid-level and senior-level professionals respectively.
- Answer a few questions about your career via email to help our resume writers tailor your resume effectively.
- Get a virtual resume writing service consultation with one of our professional resume writers.
- Receive your brand new custom resume in your inbox in three days or less!
Key Takeaways
- Mid-level and senior-level resumes must go beyond job duties to highlight leadership, business impact, and strategic contributions. Employers want to see career progression and measurable results.
- As a general rule, mid-level professionals benefit from using a combination resume to showcase both skills and experience and senior-level executives benefit from the chronological format to feature career growth. However, analyze all resume formats to decide which one suits you best.
- Include a strong professional summary, a skills section with job-relevant keywords, and a results-focused work experience. Focus on the past 10-15 years to make your resume as relevant and concise as possible.
- Replace generic job duties with results-driven accomplishments that demonstrate your real value as an employee. Ensure your resume achievements demonstrate success like revenue increases, process improvements, or team growth.
- Take advantage of our professional tools: resume templates, resume samples, resume-writing guide, career resources, and Resume Builder to craft a compelling resume that lands you interviews.
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