How to Add SQL Projects to Your Resume

If you have some recent SQL projects you’re proud of, it makes total sense to put them on your resume! In this article, we will explain how to power up your resume with SQL projects.

If you are a student or a recently-graduated professional, finding an SQL job can be challenging. When you have little to no work experience, it’s hard for recruiters to know if you are a reliable worker and a good match for the given role.

Instead of waiting for a kind company to give you a chance, you have to prove that you are indeed a professional with good technical skills. You can do this by posting articles and videos about a particular SQL topic. However, I recommend you upload a whole SQL project online and mention it on your resume. This allows a company to evaluate your capacity to create an entire product based on business requirements.

This article will demonstrate how to put an SQL project on a resume. It will also include examples of how SQL projects are listed on resumes.

Before we start, let me tell you about the course SQL Databases for Practice on LearnSQL.com. This course represents a unique concept: instead of having exercises, it provides a playground of 7 databases for users to work with on their own. This really helps you get a feel for real-world data analysis and manipulation.

Tips for Putting an SQL Project on a Resume

If you are an experienced professional, putting SQL projects on a resume is not as relevant as your professional experience (although it can still be a good idea). If you are a beginner, you should compensate for your lack of experience by highlighting projects. To do so, create a special section on your resume where you present projects you‘ve completed in the last few years.

Are you curious about how to develop a SQL project from scratch? Our friend Tihomir Babic explains it brilliantly in his article SQL Project for Portfolio: Northwind Store.

What Projects Are Worth Putting on a Resume?

You can mention all kinds of SQL projects in your resume: school projects, personal projects, or freelance work are all worth including. However, try to showcase projects that are relevant to the position you are applying for.

Even for a beginner, some SQL projects don’t have much relevance and won’t add value to your resume. For example, a simple project showing basic CRUD operations only proves you know the language’s fundamentals.

Also, avoid redundancy. If you have professional experience and the work you achieved in your previous roles is similar to some of your featured projects, you are overlapping. Professional experience will always be more relevant; in this case, I’d leave out the projects that showcase skills already covered by your experience.

Finally, be careful with intellectual rights and sensitive information. A school project is technically owned by the educational institution where you studied, so ensure you have the appropriate permission to show it. If the project is one you did for a client or a company, you should ask them if they will allow you to make it public. In all cases, remove or anonymize personal and sensitive information: database and column names, data sets, etc.

How to Summarize SQL Projects in Your Resume

Once you have selected the right SQL projects for your resume, you need to summarize them. For each one of the projects, include the title, project duration, a brief description, and the technologies you used (especially the database engine). If it was a group project, describe your role and the way you interacted with other members of the team.

Also, try to describe the projects’ results and impact using relevant KPIs (key performance indicators). You can use indicators related to performance (e.g. average query execution time and database latency) or to users (e.g. the adoption rate or a business impact like a sales increase).

Don’t forget to emphasize how the project is relevant to the position you’re applying for. You can use ChatGPT or another AI tool to help you write a concise project description. However, you should be careful: AI-generated text is very obvious. Avoid using words like “delve”, “explore”, or “dive into”, and don’t indulge in lyrical flights of vocabulary.

Don’t Minimize Personal Projects

In leading multiple tech interviews over the last few years, I’ve noticed that candidates tend to minimize their own work. A candidate told me once: “I’m a little bit ashamed to tell you this, but I have experience with this database technology because I love anime. I used the database technology to build my own library system.” There is no reason for shame! Although personal projects do not have the same weight as professional experience, they are totally valid – you should mention them on your resume.

Incidentally, can database technology depend on the size of a project? The answer is yes! Jakub Romanowski talks about it in his article Which Database Is Best for Small Projects?

Use GitHub

If you can, make your projects available on GitHub and link to them in your resume. This way, a prospective employer can check the quality of your implementation and code. And if you have external contributions with forks and pull requests, it will reinforce your professional credibility.

Make sure the GitHub repo you link to has a nice README file to help the recruiter verify your project.

Don’t Forget LinkedIn!

You may not know this, but you can add your projects on your LinkedIn profile. I highly recommend it, because your LinkedIn profile is recruiters’ first stop before a possible interview. Therefore, it should contain everything about your professional life: skills, education, experience, and projects.

To add an SQL project on LinkedIn, go to your profile, click on “Add profile section” and then on “Add projects”.

Add a section on your LinkedIn profile

Projects section on my LinkedIn profile

How to Put SQL Projects on a Resume: Examples

In this section, I will give three examples of SQL projects you can put on your resume. These will follow the tips from the previous section.

Project: Library Management Database

Description: Designed and implemented a simple relational database to manage book inventory, member information, and borrowing history for a small community library.

Technology Used: SQLite, Excel (for initial data input)

Results and Impact:

• Improved Data Organization: Created structured tables for books, members, and borrowing history, reducing manual record-keeping errors by 80 percent.
• Faster Book Lookup: Implemented efficient SQL queries for book availability and borrowing status, reducing the average lookup time from 5 minutes to 10 seconds.
• Enhanced Reporting: Designed basic reports to show overdue books and frequent borrowers, increasing overdue fee collection by 15 percent.
• User-Friendly Access: Provided library staff with simplified SQL scripts for day-to-day operations, enhancing operational efficiency.

Project: Personal Budget Tracker

Description: Built a simple SQL database to track personal income and expenses, categorize transactions, and analyze spending habits over time.

Technology Used: MySQL, Google Sheets (for data import/export)

Results and Impact:

• Improved Financial Awareness: Categorized and tracked 6 months of financial transactions, identifying top spending categories and reducing unnecessary expenses by 10 percent.
• Automated Monthly Reports: Created SQL queries to generate summary reports for income, expenses, and savings trends, reducing manual calculations by 90 percent.
• Customizable Insights: Implemented filters for date ranges and categories, providing detailed insights into specific spending patterns.
• User-Friendly Functionality: Designed SQL scripts to easily add, update, and delete transactions, streamlining data management for ongoing use.

Project: Employee Performance Dashboard

Description: Designed and implemented a SQL-driven dashboard for a mid-sized IT company to monitor and analyze employee performance metrics, including productivity, attendance, and project contribution.

Technology Used: PostgreSQL, Power BI, Excel (for initial data collection)

Results and Impact:

• Improved Productivity: Identified underperforming teams and proposed targeted training programs, leading to a 20% increase in productivity within six months.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Delivered real-time insights to HR and management, reducing the time to generate performance reports by 50 percent.
• Enhanced Employee Engagement: Introduced KPI tracking that informed reward and recognition programs, boosting employee satisfaction scores by 10 percent.
• Reduced Attrition: Flagged potential burnout risks by analyzing overtime patterns, helping reduce employee turnover by 7 percent.

Project: Portfolio Northwind Store

This example of a SQL resume project is based on the excellent article SQL Project for Portfolio: Northwind Store by Tihomir Babic.

Description: Built an SQL project for a data analyst portfolio from the Northwind store dataset.

Technology Used: PostgreSQL

Results and Impact:

• Enhanced Reporting: Showed total sales, average order value, total number of orders, and number of unique customers for each channel.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Delivered insightful data allowing to target high-value customers by channel.

Learn SQL Today!

In this article, we’ve learned how to put SQL projects on a resume and which projects to include. I hope this will motivate you to show your projects and help move recruiters to read your resume!

Are you starting your SQL journey and want to learn more about data analysis? Our SQL for Data Analysis track is all you need: 4 courses and almost 500 coding challenges to help you understand how to effectively analyze data with SQL.

Thanks for reading this article; I really hope you liked it! See you in the next one!