Resumes
Would you be willing to look over my resume?
This is probably the question you asked me before I sent you this wiki page! I am happy to look over your resume, but I request that you look over this page first. This page contains all general suggestions I will make and I highly recommend that you implement as many of these suggestions that make sense to you as possible. After you make changes, you are welcome to give me your updated resume and I will give you personalized feedback.
If you have any questions at all, please ask me - this is to help you! I want you to get that interview as much as you do!
Purpose
The purpose of a resume may seem obvious - to get a job, right? Sort of. The purpose of a resume is to get a specific type of job. I assume, if you've reached out to me, that you're not looking to get just any job. I know when I graduated university, I wanted to get a job that used my newest degree. While there is nothing wrong with working retail or in food service, that's not what my goal, and therefore the purpose of my resume, was.
Additionally, after I finished graduate school, I realized that I had two potential career paths: using my new degree to become an Instructional Designer and continuing as a Senior Software Engineer. Since each path required me to highlight specific and mostly mutually exclusive skills, I ended up with two resumes.
If you have multiple career paths in your resume, I highly recommend considering creating multiple resumes. For your first walkthrough of this wiki page, pick one career. It can be the one you have the most experience with or the one you want to work in the most - either is fine. If there are multiple titles for the same type of position (Software Engineer, Software Developer, Programmer, etc) or are closely related (Instructional Designer, Curriculum Developer, etc), you do not have to break them out into separate resumes since what you highlight for each position title will be the same. If you are unsure if there will be enough overlap, pick one title for now and see at the end if it makes sense to include additional titles with the resume.
Complete the following statement:
The purpose of this resume is to get a position as a ____________________________________.
General Format
I recommend you start with the following sections:
- Contact
- Objective
- Work Experience
- Education
- Skills
- Other Relevant Experience
This is how we will start grouping information to put on the resume. We will refine these sections as we start putting information into them.
Contact
How can someone who wants to interview you contact you?
Here are some options:
- Phone number
- Only include if you will answer! I don't include my phone number because I almost never answer unknown numbers, so phone is probably the worst way to contact me, besides smoke signals (carrier pigeon would probably work though)
- You may also make a note of hours ("between 9 and 5 [your local time zone] only") or how to use to use your number ("call only", "text only", "call or text")
- If you include your phone number, make sure your voicemail message is professional and your responses to unknown numbers is professional
- Email address
- Only include if you check your email regularly!
- Make sure your email address is professional - no "hotgurl09" or "feralboi77" (apologies to "hotgurl09" and "feralboi77", if you're out there, for being my example)
- If you need a new email address, you can get a new one for free with gmail.com or proton.me (if you're not a fan of Google)
- Social media
- Only include professional accounts - you definitely do not want to link your personal Instagram or Twitter/X - LinkedIn is a popular one to include
- Only include if you update regularly - your functionally blank LinkedIn is not worth linking to
- Online portfolios
- Your professional website is a good one here
- So are curated ones, like GitHub or GitLab for coding and Dribbble for design
- Again, only include these if you update regularly - your required GitHub from that one course is only worth linking to if it a) was recently created or b) continued to be used after the course ended
Objective
What are you looking for?
Work Experience
What practical experience do you have that is relevant to your objective?
Education
What education do you have that is relevant to your objective?
= Skills
What skills (soft or hard) do you have that are relevant to your objective?
Other Relevant Experience
What other experience do you have that is relevant to your objective?