How To Build My Resume

How do you build a resume, so that it looks good and gets the message across that you are qualified for the position that you are applying for? There are a number of ways that you can build a resume with potential for success-the catch is, you just have to know them, and implement them into your professional resume. Here’s what you need to know about building your resume for success in your career.

1. Start with an Outline: The best place to start when building a resume for the first time, is to start with an outline of your education, employment history, and other applicable skills and achievements. Start brainstorming these before you even determine how you want to structure your resume-as these topics are the most important aspects of a well written resume. You should include dates, degrees obtained, and places and positions in which you have worked.

2. Add Details: The next step in building a resume is necessarily including details about your education and employment and skills in a rough draft format. You can start by just jotting down highlights of each section, to make sure you have all the information you need to formulate each section.

3. Review Job Postings: Once you have a working idea of what kinds of qualifications you have to offer your career, you need to determine what job postings for these positions are looking for in the way of education, skills, and experience. Make a list of the most common requirements and recommendations for education, experience, and skills.

4. Compare/Contrast/Include: The next step is to compare and contrast what your experience and education has, and what employers are looking for. This will help you determine what areas of your experience you may need to build upon, as well as what aspects you should include in your resume, that could have been previously omitted.

5. Choose a Format: Once you have a clear idea of how you measure up in your industry and for the position you are interested in, it is time to choose a format for your resume that best suits your career experience strengths. So, for example, you may find that man y employers are seeking four years’ experience in your position and you only have two years. You would probably be best suited to a skills based format-that focuses less on the actual time you were employed in your position, and more on what you accomplished and the skills you bring to this position. Besides the skills based format, there is also the chronological and combination formats, which cater to employment history and a combination of employment history and skills, respectively.

6. Start with Contact Info: Once you have the meat of the document considered, it’s time to start creating the resume; and this all begins with your contact information in the header. The header can be placed left, center, or right at the top of the page; and should include the following information: full name, address, phone number(s), and email address(es). This is how the employer will contact you if they are interested in speaking with you further, and so it should be as accurate and complete as possible. Try to make your full name stand out as a couple points larger in font, and with the use of bolding.

7. Include an Objective: Next, decide if your experience and skills and education all point conclusively towards the position in which you are seeking employment. In most cases, a person’s experience is not that specific, and thus, a career objective can help bring all the experience together fluidly; so that the employer knows what the applicant’s career goals are. An objective is a 1-2 sentence career goal that tells the employer what strengths they bring to the career goal stated.

8. Piece It Together: Once you have all these pieces, the only thing left is to start piecing it together, so that it looks like a resume. This will take some working and reworking to make it fit the format that you chose, and include all the aspects of your career past as possible and in the best possible light; but once you do, you will have a resume created for success.