The usual answer is to add a Certifications section under Education and list what you hold. That answer is correct for roughly half the certifications people ask about, and quietly wrong for the other half, because it treats every credential as the same kind of fact. Before you decide on formatting, decide which of two jobs your certification is doing.
Gating or supporting
A gating certification is the thing the employer cannot hire without. A nursing licence for a nursing post, a CPA for a controller role, a commercial driving licence, the specific cloud or security credential a posting names under requirements rather than under nice to have. Nobody reads past its absence. It is not a detail about you, it is the reason you are eligible.
A supporting certification corroborates something your bullets already show. A Scrum credential on a resume that describes running sprints. A cloud associate badge under a role where you were already deploying to that cloud. It adds confidence to a claim, and it is worth nothing on its own.
The same document, the same credential name, two completely different placements.
If it gates the job, put it where the first look lands
A gating credential goes in the top third of the page: after your name on the contact line, in the headline, and again in the section lower down. That is not decoration. The issuers themselves treat the name line as the credential's home. PMI's own trademark usage guidelines describe a credential as appearing immediately following the holder's name, in the form "Joseph Smith, PMP", with no symbol or attribution needed in that position.
There is a mechanical reason too. Recruiting systems search the text of what you uploaded. Greenhouse, to take one that documents the feature, lets a recruiter switch on full text search across candidate resumes and returns the people whose resume text matches the terms typed in. A credential you hold but did not spell out cannot come back in that result, and a recruiter filtering a pile for a required licence is doing exactly that search.
If the posting names the credential, mirror the posting's wording as well as the issuer's. Our resume keyword generator will pull the required terms out of a posting if you would rather not read for them, and the broader method is in our guide on tailoring a resume to a job description.
If it supports the job, group it and leave it low
Supporting certifications belong in one place, near the bottom, under a heading that says Certifications or Licenses and Certifications. One place is the operative part. Scattering them, one in the summary, one tucked under a job, one at the end, makes a reader reconstruct your credentials instead of reading them, and it makes the same credential look like several.
Order that section by relevance to this posting, not by the date you earned each one. The section exists to be skimmed after a decision is already leaning your way.
Write it so it can be checked
Certifications are one of the few claims on a resume that a stranger can verify in seconds, which changes how precisely you should write them. AWS issues digital badges that carry metadata identifying the issuer and the credential, with a link anyone can click to confirm the issue date and issuer. Nursing licences sit in Nursys, whose QuickConfirm service lets an employer or a member of the public look up a licence and any publicly available discipline record for free.
So give each entry the full credential name first with the acronym after it, the issuing body, and the date earned. Add the expiry where the credential has one, and the licence or credential number where a public registry uses it. An approximate name for a credential that has an official one reads to anyone holding it as a small error about their profession.
Two things to avoid. A credential that has expired should come off, or move to a line that says plainly when it lapsed. PMI's guidance is blunt about this: anyone whose certification has lapsed should stop using the credential. And a certificate of completion from a course is not a certification. Listing it as one under a heading that says Certifications is the kind of overclaim a reader notices precisely because the real ones around it are checkable.
When the resume is assembled, run it through our ATS resume checker to confirm the credential text actually survives parsing. A certification that renders inside a header, a text box or a table sometimes does not come back out as searchable text, which puts you in the same position as never having listed it.