Career Tools: Resume: An Artfully Shaped Explanation of Your Life
Putting a resume together does not mean starting at the top of the page and simply working down through objective, education, employment history, etc. To create the killer resume don’t be afraid to prepare some notes for each section. And don’t strain to include every single biographical fact about yourself. While no one will mistake it for a museum-worthy sculpture, the beginning of a good resume is like a huge hunk of clay that a candidate will rub and pinch away until reaching the essence of her academic and professional talents.
The skeleton of a resume is your previous internships, summer jobs and extracurricular activities. Take out a notepad and jot down not just the name and title of your previous jobs but also what skills they utilized and what achievements you made. Pay careful attention to these achievements. The employment section of your resume is of vital importance since employers often pay it the most attention.
It should accurately reflect how you transferred skills learned in the classroom to the workplace. Think about whom you were working with. Were you assisting a top vice president or working with a team of your peers? Looking past your professional skills, did any of your duties show off various aspects of your personality that an employer would find attractive?
The rest of your resume — education, awards, special skills, military service, second languages . should be a lot like filling in the blanks. But one section that you should not skip over is the career objective. Usually one or two sentences placed just below your name at the top of your resume, a career objective is the first place an employer can weed out a candidate. For example, writing “Objective: To work for a start-up,” will probably not get you hired at IBM. What you are trying to do in a career objective is to express your interest in working for the company and to give a brief picture of what you can bring to the position. You can either:
- generally mention a specific field if the resume is being sent blindly to a company.
- make a reference to a specific job title if you are responding to an advertisement or a career fair recruiter’s presentation.
