2D Animator Resume Guide & Tips

Your resume is one of the first things a hiring manager will look at when they are sifting through applications. It is a concise, 1-2 page history of your work experience, education, and professional accomplishments and aims to communicate your skills and proficiencies to a hiring manager. It is also very important to consider when building job materials. Since hiring managers may receive hundreds or even thousands of resumes for any given job opening, they are likely to try and expedite narrowing the field down to the candidates they want to pay serious attention to. One of the most common ways they do this is to look at resumes and cover letters to cull the first round of applicants, meaning that if your resume is uninspiring, you may find your materials not getting the attention they probably deserve. 

What to Put on a 2D Animator Resume

Your resume should be at most two pages long, and include only the most vital elements of your work and educational background. There are things you’ll need to include (like contact information, prior employment, and professional references), so you will have even less space to be particular about why a hiring manager should continue looking over your application. In addition to the general content, there are a few things, particularly related to professional accomplishments, that prospective 2D Animators will want to foreground in their resumes.

Personal Contact Information

Every resume, regardless of field, will contain your personal contact information, including your name, where employers can reach you, and where you are currently located. This information is vital, but it shouldn’t take up too much space in your resume since it doesn’t impact your chances of getting hired. The only thing you can do here to improve your chances is to make the contact information as professional as possible, particularly if you list an email address or personal webpage (i.e., use a business or school email address).

Educational History

Resumes will include a brief overview of your relevant educational background, letting hiring managers know where you got your degree or training. You want to include only the most relevant highlights here, so don’t waste too much space on things like your high school education. Instead, you should list some specific, relevant training programs, capstone courses, or other educational training seminars that you have participated in to demonstrate how your unique educational background makes you a more desirable candidate.

Work History

Like educational history, all resumes will include your relevant work experience and background. Also, like the educational history section, the work history section should focus on your experience as a 2D Animator or your experience in jobs that demonstrate that you have built up the soft skills required for working as a 2D Animator. A good way to do this is to include a brief list of relevant job responsibilities so that hiring managers know what work you did and why you think it is relevant to their job opening.

Professional Accomplishments and Accolades

You also want to include a catch-all section for relevant professional work that doesn’t neatly fit into your broader work or educational background. For example, if you worked as a volunteer or intern, you may want to include it here. If you worked on a project during one of your prior jobs that received industry recognition, you’ll want to mention that here. If you received a relevant scholarship, fellowship, or other academic awards during your training, this is where to put it. This is something of a catch-all section, but it is important to foreground this specific accomplishment to help hiring managers understand your unique qualifications better. 

This is also a place to list professional accreditations, like third-party certifications. Suppose you have participated in any significant workplace training programs outside the ones listed in your education history. In that case, this is a good place to include that information, particularly if any of these training programs came from industry-recognized skills training providers. You can also place this in your education history section, and the decision will likely come down to which one of the two options looks cleaner on the resume since you don’t want to jam too much into one section.

Other Relevant Skills

Near the end of your resume, you can also include a section that covers your relevant skills that don’t fit into any of the other sections of the resume. This can be things like general soft skills that you have experience with (for example, having worked as a team leader in some capacity) or technical skills (such as proficiency in Excel). You don’t want to just list everything you can think of here, but it is a useful section for demonstrating that you have applicable skills outside of the expected baseline. Whether or not to include a given skill will vary depending on the position, but you don’t want to look like you are stretching the definition of relevant to find things to put in this section. 

5 2D Animator Resume Tips

Since most resumes contain the same kinds of relevant information, it is important to pay extra attention to the resume-building process to help your resume stand out from the rest. Since the resume is only about 2 pages long, word economy will be vital, so you’ll want to work to ensure that you are saying as much as possible in the limited space available. 

Foreground Important Information

One of the biggest mistakes that a resume writer can make is burying important information in the middle of a large section. Before you begin writing your resume, you want to brainstorm the most important parts of your work and educational background, as well as your most important professional accomplishments and build your resume so that those lines are highlighted. This can mean re-arranging the order of your sections or taking a non-chronological approach to constructing the resume. Just remember that if you put something in the middle of the second page, there is a non-zero chance that a hiring manager won’t see it and it may as well not have been there.

Use the Resume to Guide Hiring Managers

Since the resume is likely one of the first things a hiring manager looks at, you can use this to your advantage. By foregrounding the things you think are most important about your professional history, you can influence how hiring managers look at the rest of your job materials. This is most obvious in the cover letter, but in the resume, for example, you may want to list important professional accolades first if you worked on a project that won an award and you want your reader to be compelled enough to look at your demo reel. Similarly, if you worked on a capstone project that feels particularly relevant to this job, you may want to list that first in your educational history.

Tailor the Resume to the Job Opening

An essential aspect of building compelling job materials is tailoring them to the job you apply for. This serves a few functions, including letting hiring managers know that you are taking the application process seriously and directing their attention to relevant skills you possess. In regards to tailoring your resume, you’ll want to foreground experience you have that is directly related to the job responsibilities you’ll be taking on if hired. For example, suppose you are applying for work at a software company. In that case, you might want to foreground having taken user interface design classes in college. In contrast, you wouldn’t want to include this information if you apply for a job at a 2D animation television studio. This can also apply to your secondary skills section. Suppose you are fluent in a foreign language. In that case, you probably won’t need to mention that, but if you are applying for a job at a major film studio that frequently employs Korean animation houses, for instance, pointing out that you speak Korean can benefit your chances of getting hired.

Make your Resume Visually Appealing

Since hiring managers may find themselves looking over hundreds of applications, it is important to make sure yours is visually appealing enough to be memorable. You don’t want to submit a bland word document full of undifferentiated text since this is likely to cause your reader to pay less attention to the individual elements of your resume. On the other hand, you don’t want your resume to be so overly designed that it is difficult to read or follow, and you certainly don’t want to look like you are putting style over substance. This can be a fine line, but it is vital to make a solid first impression with your resume.

You should also consider building your resume so that the design works to guide the reader toward important information. 2D animation is a form of visual composition and communication, so you should understand how to draw attention to specific aspects of your resume to get them to stand out. This won’t need to be particularly elaborate or complicated, but it can help immensely in designing your resume so that even its design works in your favor.

Get Feedback

It is very important that you iterate on your resume. Therefore, you must have someone with experience looking for jobs in creative industries review your resume and provide feedback. This can be even more helpful if you know someone who has worked in these fields and been a part of a hiring committee or worked as a hiring manager because they can tell you what they looked for and prioritized when reading over resumes. Since not every aspiring 2D Animator knows someone who has worked in the industry, learning 2D animation from a reputable training program with live instructors is even more valuable for your long-term career opportunities. Noble’s career certificate programs offer students one-on-one mentorship opportunities that are the perfect place to get advice and feedback on your resume and other job materials from instructors with years of experience in the industry.

Learn the Skills to Become a 2D Animator at Noble Desktop

Once you’ve committed to learning the skills necessary to become a 2D Animator, Noble Desktop is available to make that dream a reality through professional skills instruction. Noble offers a wide array of 2D animation classes, available in person or online, and all of these classes are taught by expert instructors with years of on-the-job experience. This structure means that regardless of how your course is delivered, you’ll receive real-time instruction and be able to ask questions and receive personalized feedback on your work. Similarly, no matter whether you take the course in person or online, you’ll benefit from small class sizes and all of the professionalization support options, including one-on-one career mentoring in the career-certificate programs. Finally, every Noble class comes with the option for a free retake within one year, meaning that you’ll have the chance to build your portfolio and get even more hands-on experience in preparation for entering the job market.

Students interested in a career change may consider enrolling in Noble’s Motion Graphics Certificate program. This class aims to teach students how to use tools like Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro to create evocative 2D and 3D animated assets for many practical projects. In this class, students will be guided through the process of using After Effects to animate text, photos, and videos, and they will learn how to modify these animations in subtle but perceptible ways slightly. Students will also learn how to create animated images using layered Photoshop and Illustrator files (this course does not include instruction in either of these tools, they are prerequisites for taking the course). Finally, students will learn how to use Premiere Pro to edit their animated assets into video files. All this work will culminate in a series of professionalization seminars, including a portfolio-building workshop and a one-on-one mentorship session, intended to prepare students for a career as a 2D or 3D Animator.

Students who aren’t ready to make a significant career shift but do want to learn 2D animation skills may want to consider one of Noble’s many motion graphics bootcamps. These classes include the Adobe After Effects Bootcamp, which provides students with guided instruction in the use of After Effects for creating animated digital assets and the Adobe Premiere Pro Bootcamp, which teaches students how to use that program to compile their animated assets into a completed project. These courses are excellent starting points for new animators looking to learn the trade. However, they don’t provide students with any of the professionalization services offered through Noble’s career certificate programs.

Finally, students who aren’t sure that they want to start learning 2D animation but are intrigued by the possibility should consult some of Noble’s free training resources to learn more. Noble’s Learn 2D Animation page, as well as their Learn After Effects and Learn Premiere Pro page compiles a weird range of articles, free seminars and resources that students can use to help them on their 2D Animation career path. Noble also provides prospective 2D Animators with a career information hub to help them decide if a career change is right for them.