Craft a Great Resume
A resume is a tailored document highlighting your skills, education, goals, and experience. It is a summary of qualifications for a job, internship, scholarship, or other opportunity. Employers will often spend far less than 30 seconds looking at each resume, so yours needs to stand out. The resources below will help guide you through the process.
Prepare Your Content
You will want to prepare your content before you begin formatting your resume. Start by listing out your activities. Include paid work, volunteer positions, internships, leadership and extracurricular activities. Depending on how much you have done, this list might go back a few years or more. Write a paragraph about each activity. Describe your accomplishments as well as your duties.
Then select several items to highlight in your resume. What are your greatest strengths? And what are the skills required for the job or industry you’re applying for? Highlight the activities that demonstrate those strengths and attest to your ability to meet the needs of the job.
Format Your Resume
Most employers spend only 20 to 30 seconds looking at each resume during the first read through, so you need to make an immediate impact.
- Condense your resume to one page
- Leave approximately 1-inch margins and plenty of white space
- Design your resume for easy skimming
- Emphasize important elements by using type elements such as boldface and italics
- Use bullet points instead of paragraphs
- Proofread carefully and have a trusted person proof read it
- Save your resume as a PDF to maintain formatting
Sections of Your Resume
- Put your name in at least 14-point type.
- Include a professional-sounding email address that you check daily.
- Include a link to your LinkedIn profile and to your website (if you have one that is professional and appropriate)
Include an objective if it conveys the stated criteria for a specific job/industry. Experienced job seekers sometimes include a Summary of Qualifications section at the beginning of their resume. A summary should be specific, and it should include as many appropriate keywords as possible.
While you’re still in school, the Education section goes above the experience section(s). If you are applying for an internship as a freshman or sophomore, include your high school below Boston College (space permitting).
The education section remains at the top of your resume if you have recently earned a graduate or professional degree.
Include your GPA if it is above 3.0. If you want to emphasize your academic training relevant to the job or internship, include a "Relevant Coursework" section where you list a few courses that are most pertinent to the position you are seeking. Significant honors and awards can be included as a sub-category of your Education section. So can study abroad experiences.
Drawing on the highlights you prepared, choose a few sentences that encapsulate your skills, duties, and accomplishments at each job or activity. Don't limit yourself to paid work, especially if you are still in college or a recent graduate.
Use bullet points to describe each experience on your resume and provide context. Great bullet points will not just state the responsibilities that you had within each of your experiences, they will include the problem you faced, the action you took, and the results you achieved. Follow the PAR method: Action Verb + Problem + Action + Result
- Start with an action verb. You want to start with an interesting verb that will catch the eye of the reader and showcase your work and contributions.
- For every one of your experiences, you want to make sure you tell the full story and demonstrate the value you added to your work. State the problem, the action you took, and the result.
- Cite numbers to make your point (e.g. number of people supervised, number of children in classroom, size of event, budget you oversaw, etc.).
Example Bullet Points
"Coordinated three events to raise funds for a class trip to New York. Raised more than $2,500, 20% over goal."
"Collaborated with 16 faculty members and administrators to lead the university-wide effort to renew the Core Curriculum, which lead to the implementation of five new courses the following semester."
You can either create a separate section to describe your extracurricular or volunteer activities, or you can include them with your work experiences.
Include a skills section if you have specialized abilities or knowledge in areas such as computer systems and applications, world languages, or lab work.
Questions?
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Resources
Action Verbs and Keywords
Can one word make a difference? Yes! Choose your words carefully when writing a resume. Strong action verbs provide power and direction. Start each line of your resume with an action verb instead of more passive words. Use keywords to make sure your resume gets noticed.
- administered
- analyzed
- assigned
- attained
- chaired
- contracted
- consolidated
- coordinated
- delegated
- developed
- directed
- evaluated
- executed
- improved
- increased
- organized
- oversaw
- planned
- prioritized
- produced
- recommended
- reviewed
- scheduled
- strengthened
- supervised
- addressed
- arbitrated
- arranged
- authored
- corresponded
- developed
- directed
- drafted
- edited
- enlisted
- formulated
- influenced
- interpreted
- lectured
- mediated
- moderated
- motivated
- negotiated
- persuaded
- promoted
- publicized
- reconciled
- recruited
- spoke
- translated
- wrote
- approved
- arranged
- catalogued
- classified
- collected
- compiled
- dispatched
- executed
- generated
- implemented
- inspected
- monitored
- operated
- organized
- prepared
- organized
- prepared
- processed
- purchased
- recorded
- retrieved
- screened
- specified
- systematized
- tabulated
- validated
- clarified
- collected
- critiqued
- diagnosed
- evaluated
- examined
- extracted
- identified
- inspected
- interpreted
- interviewed
- investigated
- organized
- reviewed
- summarized
- surveyed
- systematized
- assembled
- built
- calculated
- computed
- designed
- devised
- engineered
- fabricated
- maintained
- operated
- overhauled
- programmed
- remodeled
- repair
- solved
- trained
- upgraded
- adapted
- advised
- clarified
- coached
- communicated
- coordinated
- developed
- enabled
- encouraged
- evaluated
- explained
- facilitated
- guided
- informed
- initiated
- instructed
- persuaded
- set goals
- stimulated
- administered
- allocated
- analyzed
- appraised
- audited
- balanced
- budgeted
- calculated
- computed
- developed
- forecasted
- managed
- marketed
- planned
- projected
- researched
- acted
- conceptualized
- created
- designed
- developed
- directed
- established
- fashioned
- founded
- illustrated
- instituted
- integrated
- introduced
- invented
- originated
- performed
- planned
- revitalized
- shaped
- assessed
- assisted
- clarified
- coached
- counseled
- demonstrated
- diagnosed
- educated
- expedited
- facilitated
- familiarized
- guided
- referred
- rehabilitated
- represented
Keyword Strategies
- When you’re applying for a position, be sure to include keywords or skills from the job listing in your resume.
- Browse online job listings in your field. Words that appear consistently in a variety of ads are your "key" words. Company pages on LinkedIn are another good resource.
- Talk to professionals in your industry.
- Include at least four industry- or job-specific keywords in your resume. The ideal number is 12.
Keyword Examples*
PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY: Award-winning corporate controller with more than ten years’ experience in two $500 million corporations. Impressive record implementing financial record database architecture that saved over $2 million annually. Proficient in Oracle, Prism, Red Brick, and SAP systems, as well as MS Project, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and FrontPage.
SKILLS
Languages: C, SQL, C++, Assembler, Pascal
Software: Oracle Developer 2000, Informix NewEra, FoxPro
OS: UNIX, Windows NT/95/3.11, MS-DOS
RDBMS: Oracle7, Informix 7
*Pam Dixon, Job Searching Online for Dummies