agoodresume: "Three Ways to Improve your Resume"
Read this article and follow its advice the next time you prepare a resume. What other suggestions have you heard for writing better resumes?
Post any other tips you have learned elsewhere on Saylor's discussion forums, along with a note asking for feedback from the community. Make sure to include the activity prompt/instructions, as well as you own comments, so your contribution can be as helpful as possible to other students.
While there, you should reply to your classmates' posts as well, especially on those topics that you feel you have already mastered.
Note: You will need to create an account at discourse.saylor.org to participate in the forum. Signing up is free and only takes a moment.
So, I gave a guest lecture last night to some people about how to make a good resume. It was really, really hard. Usually I’m working one-on-one with a person, for a specific job, and we extrapolate all kinds of general tips and tricks from that one experience of crafting the resume. That’s how I teach. I’m not good at throwing up a power point and just….TALKING about stuff.
On my way home, I was thinking about how to improve that presentation. What I decided was to focus on tips for making your resume better than it currently is. Not starting from scratch, not even with a particular job in mind. Just things you can do this week to make your resume a better document.
1. Read other people’s resumes.
Do this however you can—ask your parents, ask your friends, hunt around on the internet for examples of resumes from people you aspire to be like. The more resumes you see, the better an idea you will have in your mind as to how you want yours to look. Don’t look at those example resumes that you find online, though, if you can help it. Use *real* people’s resumes because they’re more likely to contain interesting formatting, word choice, or arrangement that you can borrow to use in your own document. Example resumes tend to be form documents with no imagination at all.
2. Have other people read your resume.
Doesn’t have to be a professional, just someone you trust to give it to you straight: a friend, your grandma, a colleague. They will catch errors you didn’t know were there. They will ask questions about what you mean. They will wonder if you should try moving this thing over to this other place. All of that is GOOD. You need feedback. Don’t take the criticisms or questions personally. Trying to build a resume in a vacuum is a recipe for disaster.
3. Find jobs that you would like to have and compare them to your resume.
You may not be ready to apply for the job you choose, but comparing what they want with what you already have can be a great way of focusing your mind and your resolve to someday get that job. It may also show you things that you assumed were in your resume, but actually aren’t. Much of the problem in editing your own resume comes from reading it over so many times that you’re not even seeing it anymore. By comparing your resume to a job description, you help yourself see your resume with new eyes, and show you what you may have been leaving out, or what language you are missing in your resume that could go in immediately. Also, it shows you what you need to be doing in order to get where you want to go. Maybe you need to know a certain piece of software or you need to have three years of experience doing a different kind of job. That knowledge can help set you on the path towards what you want to do, as well as making your resume a better document.