Dates on degrees don’t make sense – will people care? I got my bachelor’s and master’s from different universities in different countries:


I enrolled for my master’s overseas when I hadn’t officially graduated undergrad yet, despite having done the allotted four years. This was since the master’s was done under the initial plan of it being a combined bachelor and master degree, with a semester abroad included. I ended up doing the entire master’s on its own abroad and graduated in 2017.
Due to some administrative issues¹, the date on my bachelors is only 2019, despite having finished all the credits for it in 2015. 


When I put on my résumé: “bachelor’s 2012–2019” that looks weird, especially with a master’s awarded in 2017. How do I best work with this weird situation to avoid confusion and having to explain the dates?




¹ My home uni exchanged my pending BE for a BSc temporarily to satisfy the programme rules abroad (i.e having a bachelor’s before being allowed to do the master’s – an issue that was only brought up partway through my studies there). Then when I finished MSc abroad, I had to mail back my BSc to have that degree exchanged for my original BE.
Different countries have different conventions around the résumé / CV, and you might want very different versions of your résumé for applying for jobs in academia or industry. That said, at a general level readers are interested in the flow (are there gaps which are unaccounted for?) and the skills trained. I would put the dates of study and a note about the date of award so that if an HR department does cross-checks, it won't flag spurious discrepancies:


  
  2015–2017 studied M.Foo, University of Bar
  2012–2015 studied B.Foo, University of Quux (degree awarded 2019)