4.8 Establishing Your Professional Self
Establishing Your Professional Self: Resume Writing
by Cassandra Branham and Megan McIntyre, Writingcommons.org
After you’ve read the job ad(s) and identified key skills and words/phrases, you might consider creating an exhaustive list of possible content for each section of the resume. Not all resumes will have all the sections below. In fact, depending on the amount of relevant experience and skills you have, you may eliminate more than one of these sections. However, maintaining a much longer list of possible content will allow you to more easily tailor your resume to various positions.
Creating Your List
To begin, list each of the potential sections (the list of headings in Table 4.8 below is not exhaustive). The idea is to create headings that allow you to categorize and demonstrate your most relevant qualifications and experiences. For each of these categories, use bullet points with phrases rather than complete sentences to describe your experiences. Action verbs, such as communicated, completed, produced, etc., help to convey your participation. To get started, consider the following questions for each section:
| POTENTIAL SECTION HEADING | Ask yourself the following |
| OBJECTIVE |
The key to writing a quality objective statement is specificity. Instead of writing: “To obtain an entry-level marketing position,” try “To obtain an entry-level social media marketing position with a global media conglomerate that will allow me to benefit the company through my knowledge of social media promotions.” For more help, see previous page’s section on Objective Statements. Please note: not all resumes should include an objective. In fact, for many resume writers the extra space taken up by the objective may be better used to expand other sections. Additionally, many employers do not expect to see objectives. |
| SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS |
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| EDUCATION |
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| WORK EXPERIENCE |
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| LINGUISTIC SKILLS |
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| TECHNICAL SKILLS |
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| ACCOMPLISHMENTS |
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| ACTIVITIES (i.e., volunteer work, shadowing, leadership/membership in honors societies, etc.) |
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Narrowing Your List
Once you’ve created your long list of experiences, you’ll have to decide how to narrow that list in order to create a concise, cohesive resume. While it might be tempting to include all of your educational, employment, and extracurricular experiences on your resume, including details that are not relevant to the position for which you are applying can often take attention away from your most relevant qualifications. In order to highlight your most impressive experiences, it is important to think critically about what the job you are targeting requires and how your experiences match up with those needs.
Undergraduate resumes are typically one full page in length. However, if you have a significant amount of experience in your field, your resume might be longer than one full page. The rule of thumb is this: Limit your undergraduate resume to one full p