Resumes

All right welcome back.

We’re onto our final section of this course.

Pre-professional writing thank you all for sticking with me this long and especially thank you to those

of you that have reached out in our Facebook community and e-mailed me also ask questions and concerns

as I explained in my introduction My goal is not to simply provide you with all this information about

writing post to work with you as a mentor on your own writing and also to develop a community where

we can discuss with others interested in improving their academic writing our own questions and concerns

and suggestions.

So again thank you to all of you that have been participating through the lectures and also outside

lectures.

I hope you are finding this very helpful and I and I really appreciate the feedback that I’ve already

received and hope that you will spend the time to give me a review and some feedback so I can improve

this course and other courses like it.

Now we’re moving outside of the academic sphere just for a moment because although I like to dream that

we go to university because we really want to learn and because we’re curious and we’re excited to explore

new ideas the reality is that most of us go to university with the final goal in mind of getting a job

right.

So we need to do some type of professional writing practice in order to prepare for the writing that

we have to do in order to secure a job at the end of our college experience or for those of us like

me that have to work throughout the college experience to be able to find a job while going to school.

So today the first lecture on the priest professional writing section is on resume writing.

So the purpose of a resume is to show your qualifications to a prospective employer.

It’s also to display to display your unique qualifications and personality.

Emphasis on the word unique or individual right.

And finally it’s to help you be invited for a job interview and there are some things that you can do

to ensure that that happens.

The first is through your organization of your resume.

We divided a resume into sections and we do this under headings such headings include things like education

work experience honors and awards or volunteer activities depending on the specific job that you’re

applying for.

And here it is.

You need to do some personal research.

You can also ask me questions if you’d like I’ll try to address those specific jobs require other specific

information.

For example I’m in academia or an academic world in my job so I apply for.

Need me to list my publications as well as conference presentations and other professional activities

that I’ve done.

And depending on the type of job you’re applying for.

It’s also important where you place these sections.

For example if I were applying for a teaching job that I’m going to put my teaching experiences as one

of the very top sections not at the very end right in the middle right.

One of the very top schools that’s the emphasis.

That’s what I want my potential employer to read first.

The next thing that’s very important is the format.

We need to use a readable format so readable format is vital in order to create a readable format.

Don’t use more than two typefaces OK.

And those typefaces should be one uniform typeface for all of your headings and then another uniform

typeface for the body.

A little note on which headings to choose.

Make sure to use from the sensory source for the headings so things like Arial had a series font for

the body like Times New Roman.

Also choose a font size that is very readable.

So my suggestion is always use between 10 and 12 points for the body headings to be larger.

Don’t make them overly large but they should be a little bit larger.

Can be a little bit larger than the body.

Also remember not to rely heavily or too heavily on bold italics and bullet points so if have lots of

different font sizes font types Paul’s italics.

Bullet points.

It gets very very fragmented.

So we need to keep her as a resume very simple and readable.

Also never decorate Erasmi.

You’d be surprised how many people continue to do this.

Never decorate your resume with clipart or other unnecessary decorations like Borders and and everything

else we do to try and make documents look pretty.

A resume does not need to look pretty through decorations and needs to look pretty through having a

very simple readable organizational format and through your own unique qualifications and personality

and a final tipis is a really neat Grilli one for a hard copy that you turn in or submit to an employer.

Make sure to print it with a laser printer on bond paper in other words make sure it looks very very

professional.

Now onto the content.

The first of course is very straightforward but enough people leave it out and I find it necessary to

repeat it here.

Those include your personal information include email address a current one if possible a professional

one for example your university email address.

You don’t want an email address like sweet blonde girl 27 right.

It’s not very professional uses professional e-mail address as you have.

Also include your phone number your physical address and if you have a professional page.

Then go ahead and provide that you are L.D.

because while many professional organizations these days

will look you up online any way and see what type of online activity you’re up to.

So you might as well just provide that forum onto your work experience rather than describing past jobs.

For example I was a secretary and assuming that they know all of the things that you did or accomplished

while you were in that position.

Your work experience or your description of your work experience should focus on quantifiable descriptions

of successful achievements and transferable skills.

I’ll discuss a little bit more here in just a second.

While describing those skills described them very concisely so don’t get flowery and descriptive in

your language described him concisely and focus on your most impressive skills and achievements.

Of course they need to be accurate so saw the time for exaggeration and they need to be written and

easily easy to understand Syal and one of the most important strategies to make that easily to understand

is to use descriptive verbs for each point and use numbers when you can rather than general descriptions

for example rather than writing manage sales team.

You could write increased team sales by 48 percent in 2013 so manage sales teams very general.

No one really knows what you did as the manager of the sales team but as you write with an active descriptive

verb like increased and then use numbers 40 percent in 2013 then your potential employer knows exactly

what you are able to accomplish.

And finally let me give you some examples.

I’ve also put the Web sites here where I took these from so that you can look them up and there’s descriptions

and discussion of these examples and why they’re good examples at these Web sites.

So I don’t need to talk through them here but I want you to be able to look at these to see how individual

they can be.

So the one the left through is organization and that’s formatting is much different than the one on

the right but very individual but they include similar key characteristics.

They’re both very readable.

They use uniform fonts for their headings and their body.

You’ll notice as you read through it as well that they use active descriptive verbs and numbers OK.

So you can look this over after the lecture after I finish lecture and turn back and look through these

examples or simply click on these Web sites.

These Web sites will also have links to other tools and suggestions and strategies for good resume writing.

But I’d also be more than happy to look at your resume and give you a few tips on it.

If you want to send it my way.