Kelley Resume Template: What the IB Workshop Teaches

The Kelley resume template from the IB Workshop is a one-page, single-column .docx with one font, fixed margins, and a rigid section order. You follow it exactly. Indiana's Investment Banking Workshop hands you this locked layout and drills you on it draft after draft. Every date and bullet on your page must sit in the same position as every other candidate's.

If you are in the workshop, you already have the file. If you are outside it, the useful part is not the template itself. It is the set of rules the template enforces, and you can apply every one of them in a plain document editor. Here is what those rules are, why they exist, and how you build a page that meets the same bar on your own.

What the Kelley resume template IB workshop locks down

Everything on your page is fixed. Margins. Font. Section order. Date alignment. The workshop treats your resume as a precision exercise, not a design project. You revise it until every line sits where it belongs. The format leaves almost nothing to your personal taste.

Why that rigidity? Your page will sit in a stack of identically structured pages during investment banking recruiting. That uniformity is the point. When every page follows the same structure, your content is all that is left to judge. A misaligned date is not a minor slip. It signals that you lack the care the role demands.

This is the same logic behind other standardized formats. The Harvard resume format enforces its own version of the same discipline. The template is not the lesson. The habit of holding every element constant is.

Precision is the test

Banking analyst roles are built on careful, error-free output. Your resume is your first sample of that work. The workshop is merciless about alignment for exactly this reason. Every date you set and every bullet you indent must hold constant from your header to your last line. Think of your resume not as a writing task but as a formatting audit.

Check your page the way you would check a spreadsheet. Open your file and compare each date line to the one above it. If one reads "Jun 2025" and another reads "June 2025," you have a consistency error. Fix it before you submit. Check your bullet indentation too: if it shifts by even a point between sections, your uniformity is broken. These details are exactly what the Kelley format trains you to catch.

Five rules you can carry to any finance resume

Strip the Kelley format down and you get a short set of principles that transfer. They apply whether or not you have the original file:

• One page, always. No exceptions, no matter how much experience you think justifies a second.
• A single column with a fixed section order, so you and every reader know where each part belongs.
• Perfectly consistent dates and punctuation down the whole page. If you abbreviate one month, you abbreviate every month.
• Bullets that lead with a result and a number, not a description of your duties.
• One conservative font at a readable size. Nothing decorative anywhere on your page.

Follow those five and you have captured what the workshop teaches. The exact margin width matters less than holding every choice constant from your header to your last line.

Financial resume examples that follow the Kelley format

Your layout is set. Now every bullet you write has to earn its space. A results-led bullet names what changed, a number or a deliverable, rather than listing what your role involved. You want your reader to see impact, not responsibility. Here is what that looks like:

Responsible for building financial models and assisting with due diligence on potential acquisitions

Built a three-statement model for a $40M acquisition, cutting the team's turnaround from 12 days to 4

The first line tells your reader what you were assigned. The second tells them what you produced. If you find yourself writing "responsible for" or "assisted with," rewrite until the verb carries a result. In your experience section, every bullet should read like the second version.

Screened 30 pitch decks in two weeks and drafted the preliminary memo for the three that advanced to diligence
Reconciled 4 portfolio company models to actuals within 48 hours of each month-end close
Prepared the cash flow section of a 200-page CIM, reducing revision cycles from five rounds to two

Notice the pattern in each line. You name the task, give a number, and end with what you produced or improved. This shape works whether you are writing bullets for banking, private equity, or corporate finance. You can build your entire experience section by repeating it.

Keep your most recent role at the top and give it three or four bullets. Older roles can drop to two. If you held a role for only a few months, one strong bullet beats three weak ones. Your page has limited space, and every line competes with every other line for your reader's attention.

You do not need the file to meet the standard

Not everyone chasing this format is a Kelley student. You can still hit the same bar. Set one font and one date format, then hold them across every line without a single slip. Your page should look as though a template locked it, even if you did the locking yourself.

What should you avoid? Anything decorative. One page of plain, precise formatting beats any layout with flair. Your goal is to disappear into the standard, not to break it. Save your personality for the interview. Your resume is proof that you can follow a spec.

If you are a student, put your education section first and your experience below it. Once you have two or more years of full-time work, flip that order. Include your GPA next to your degree if it strengthens your page. If it does not, leave it off and let your bullets carry the weight.

Save your final version as a .pdf unless the application specifically asks for .docx. A .pdf locks your spacing and your fonts so nothing shifts when your file opens on a different machine.

A plain layout passes the software too

If your banking application passes through parsing software, and you should assume it will, a single-column page of real text comes out in reading order. Your name as ordinary text, no graphics, your sections in the order you set them.

We tested two-column résumés and found that a geometric PDF parser still spliced sidebar text into the body at a 76pt gutter width. That is a wide gap, and it was not enough to keep sections separate. The Kelley-style format avoids this entirely because it is one column by design.

A clean single-column layout like our classic template gives you the plain, precise page the Kelley format is really about. Match the rules: one page, perfect uniformity, and results-led bullets. You meet the same bar with or without the original file.