Drywall Installer Resume Examples & Writing Guide

Drywall splits into two trades that often get one job title. Hangers frame and screw the board up; tapers, or finishers, tape, mud, sand and get the wall to the finish level the architect asked for. Say which one you are, or say you do both, in the first line. This sample is a commercial hanger who also finishes to Level 4 and 5. The name and companies are made up.

The person hiring you is trying to work out how many sheets you will put up on your first Monday and how much of it will come back on the punch list. Four things answer that.

• Hanger, taper or both. These are different skills and different pay rates. If you can do both, say so; if you are strictly a hanger, say that too rather than getting hired for a finish crew and struggling.
• Production rate. Sheets per day, units per day, square feet per week. A number tells a foreman where to put you on the crew. Say the board size you are counting, because 4x8 and 4x12 are not the same day's work.
• Commercial or residential. Metal studs, fire-rated assemblies and shaft walls are commercial work. Wood studs, texture and small patches are residential. Say which you have done and how recently.
• Safety cards and lifts. OSHA 10 or 30, aerial and scissor lift training, silica awareness, fall protection. On a commercial site these decide whether you can badge in on day one.

“Tell me your board count and whether you hang, finish or both. Then tell me you have run a lift and read a fire-rated detail. Everything else is a bonus. What I never learn from most resumes is whether the guy can hang a ceiling, and that is half the job on commercial work.”

Three or four lines. Years, commercial or residential, hang or finish, production number, and your safety cards. Objectives only for helpers and apprentices.

The left column is what almost every drywall resume says. The right column is what makes a foreman pick up the phone.

Useful numbers: sheets per day and board size, square feet per week, units per day on multifamily, finish level, punch-list items, waste percentage, crew size, days without an incident. If you never counted, count next week and use that.

Name materials, systems and tools. "Hard worker" costs you a line and buys nothing.

• Board types: 1/2 in and 5/8 in Type X, moisture-resistant, mold-resistant, abuse and impact-resistant, cement board, sound-damping panels
• Framing and layout: metal stud and track, wood stud, deflection track, furring, backing for grab bars and cabinets, chalk line and laser layout
• Systems: shaft wall, area separation wall, fire-rated and smoke-rated assemblies, acoustic partitions, soffits and bulkheads
• Finishing: taping, bedding, second and third coat, sanding, Levels 0 to 5, corner bead and reveal trim, skim coating, texture (orange peel, knockdown) and texture matching
• Tools: screw gun, router, panel lift, bazooka and automatic taping tools, flat boxes, angle head, drywall saw, rasp, vacuum sander
• Access: scissor lift, boom lift, baker and rolling scaffold, stilts where permitted
• Paperwork: blueprint and shop drawing reading, material takeoff, daily reports, punch lists

Worth listing separately if true: dust control on occupied buildings, work in healthcare and clean areas, patching and repair on insurance jobs, and Spanish or English as a second language, which matters on mixed crews.

Drywall crews hire helpers constantly. A helper stocks board, cuts, screws, mixes mud and cleans up, and learns to hang inside a year if they stay. What a foreman wants to see is that you will show up and that you can carry a 12 ft sheet.

1. 1Take the OSHA 10-hour construction course. It is online, it is cheap, and it lets a contractor put you on a site.
2. 2Say plainly that you can lift and carry: a 4x12 sheet of 5/8 in board weighs roughly 100 lb, and two-man carries are the whole first month.
3. 3List any hand-tool or trade work you have done, even unpaid: framing a shed, patching walls, painting, tiling, working on a farm or in a warehouse.
4. 4Give your transportation and your start time. Drywall crews start early and move between sites; "own truck, can be on any metro site by 6:30am" is a real advantage.
5. 5If a union apprenticeship interests you, look at the interior systems and drywall finisher programs run by local carpenters' and painters' unions in your area and say you have applied.

• OSHA 10-Hour or 30-Hour Construction. Ten hours for a helper or hanger, thirty for a foreman. Many general contractors will not badge you without it.
• Aerial and scissor lift operator training to ANSI A92, with the familiarization for the specific machine on site.
• Respirable crystalline silica awareness training, because sanding and cutting fall under the OSHA silica standard for construction.
• Fall protection and scaffold user training. Say if you have competent person training for scaffold.
• Powered industrial truck (forklift) evaluation if you move board around a site.
• First Aid and CPR.
• Apprenticeship: the United Brotherhood of Carpenters runs interior systems carpenter programs and the painters' union runs drywall finisher programs. If you completed or started one, name the local and the years.

• One page. Drywall work is judged on the last three or four jobs.
• Header: trade (hanger, taper or both), safety cards, whether you have tools and a truck, and your travel radius.
• Reverse-chronological with month and year. Construction is seasonal and layoffs are normal, so a one-line reason for a gap ("job completed, crew laid off") beats silence.
• If you have worked for many contractors, group the short ones under one heading and list the projects underneath by name, size and your role.
• No photo, no date of birth. In the UK this trade is called dry lining or plasterboard fitting, but a US resume keeps US conventions.
• PDF unless the contractor asks for something else. Many subcontractors also take texted photos of resumes, so keep the type large enough to read on a phone.