Trades & Services Resume Examples & Writing Guides

Writing a resume for trades & services roles

Trade resumes are read fast, often on a phone, often by someone who will hire you this week. Tickets and licences go directly under the summary — White Card, High Risk Work classes, trade qualifications, with issuing bodies and expiry dates — because site managers and agencies scan for those before anything else.

Project type and scale do the work that job titles cannot: commercial versus residential, building value, crew size, machinery operated. Specific equipment experience is a hard filter for many site roles, so name the machines and classes you are signed off on.

Safety record is the other universal signal: lost-time injuries, inspection pass rates, safety representative roles. Keep the document black-and-white, single column, and scannable — it may well be printed and pinned in a site office.

Each example below includes a full sample resume with correct ticket placement and a writing guide built for how trade hiring actually works. agencies move fast and keep databases: your resume will be parsed into a candidate system and searched by ticket, so the literal text matters more than the story. Write ticket names the way the issuing body prints them, include expiry dates in a consistent format, and never put a licence inside an image. A trades resume that parses cleanly gets submitted for more roles than the one you applied to.

Finally, keep a master copy of every ticket, licence, and induction with its expiry date, and rebuild the resume from it each time you apply. Trades hiring moves fast — a role posted Monday can be shortlisted Wednesday — and the candidate whose document is ready wins the site. The templates below get you that document in an afternoon.

Sections every trades & services resume needs

Trades & Services resume examples