Criminal justice internship resume examples from 2025

Your resume summary sums up your experience and skills, making it easy for hiring managers to understand your qualifications at a glance. Here are some tips to writing the most important 2-4 sentences of your resume:

Step 1: Mention your current job title or the role you're pursuing.

Step 2: Include your years of experience in criminal justice internship-related roles. Consider adding relevant company and industry experience as relevant to the job listing.

Step 3: Highlight your greatest accomplishments. Here is your chance to make sure your biggest wins aren't buried in your resume.

Step 4: Again, keep it short. Your goal is to summarize your experience and highlight your accomplishments, not write a paragraph.

Hiring managers spend under a minute reviewing resumes on average. This means your summary needs to demonstrate your value quickly and show why you are the perfect fit for the criminal justice internship position.

Your Skills section is an easy way to let recruiters know you have the skills to do the job. Just as importantly, it can help your resume not get filtered out by hiring software. Here is how to make the most of your skills section and make sure you have the right keywords:

1. Start with the job listing. Frequently, the keywords looked for by recruiters will be listed. Be careful to include all skills in the job listing you have experience with.
2. Consider all the software and tools you use on a daily basis. When in doubt, list them!
3. Make sure you use accurate and up to date terms for all the skills listed.

These five steps should give you a strong elevator pitch and land you some criminal justice internship interviews.

Next you should include your work experience. Structure your work experience section by listing your most recent experience first, followed by earlier roles in reverse chronological order.

Start with your job title, company name, city, and state on the left. Align dates in month and year format on the right-hand side.

Include only recent, relevant jobs. Avoid including work experience over 20 years to avoid ageism.

Beneath each job, you should have bullet points to emphasize why you're the perfect fit for the criminal justice internship.

Your resume is your chance to show your biggest accomplishments. Don't just list your job responsibilities, instead take the opportunity to show why you're really good at what you do. Here is how you do that:

• Start with strong action verbs like managed, spearheaded, created, etc. Your goal is to show what you did and verbs will help demonstrate your contributions.
• Use numbers to quantify your achievements. Did you save time with a new report? Increase revenue? How large was the team you managed?
• Keep it concise. You're highlighting your achievements. Consider if all details you are sharing are relevant, or can be written more efficiently.

Here are examples from great criminal justice internship resumes:

The education section should display your highest degree first.

Place your education section appropriately on your resume. If you graduated over 5 years ago, this section should be at the bottom of your resume. If you just graduated and lack relevant work experience, the education section should go to the top.

If you have a bachelor's or master's degree, do not list your high school education. If your graduation year is more than 15-20 years ago, it's better not to include dates in this section.

Here are some examples of good education entries for resumes:

If you have any additional certifications or education-like achievements, add them to the education section.

Start simple. Include the full name of the certification. It's also good to mention the organization that issued the certification. Next, specify when you obtained the certification.

Here are some of the best certifications to have on criminal justice internship resumes:

1. Certified Criminal Justice Specialist (CCJS)