Resume Advice

[blueerica]

To continue from the Complaint Department thread...

My resume would easily be short except for my gap in education, and work-gap in the industry I'm "applying" for. To my benefit in comparison to fellow students, I have worked in and around the industry before (marketing project management). To my detriment, though my reasons are solid for the "break," I am older, which puts me in a position of having worked jobs completely off my career path (though with elements that are easily applicable to project management).

What should be included? What should be excluded?

Should I only list the jobs that were specific to my career objective, or should I include one or two of the others (for a chronological resume, the style my professor is requiring).

Additionally, I did not complete my Associates Degree in Junior College, but directly (over the course of a giant gap in education time) applied to Cal State Long Beach to continue my education. How should that be applied to my resume?

Any advice, opinions?

[Tref]

Lie, lie, lie.

[Bornieo: Fully Loaded]

I was told once that you should put jobs that are in directly related to what you are applying for. Instead of "Work History" as a heading, put Related Work History. That way the gaps just/could mean unrelated jobs or out of work.

Good Luck!

[BarTopDancer]

you were working when you didn't go to school. As you get older employers become more understanding about having a gap in education even if the work history is out of field.

[Alex]

If you have enough work history to start filtering out the irrelevant jobs, that is ok but if not then you need to list the best of the ones you did have and emphasize how they contribute to your abilities needed for the job you're applying for.

For example, when I was going from librarianship to project management none of my jobs were "on topic" and I didn't have any special education to tout, so each job had a little detail emphasizing appropriate translatable skills (research skills, working successfully with a broad swath of humanity with different needs, blah blah blah).

The problem with that approach is you end up doing a lot of tweaking the resume to match the specific job (which is sometimes difficult since you may not know much about the specific job or you go into an interview and forget exactly what you said in the resume).

Ideally the resume is somewhat stable while the cover letter sells the past experience as actually relevant. But in today's modern world (where I rarely see a paper resume and even more rarely a cover letter) you shouldn't rely on that.

For project management, even if you can't stress experience with specific management models, you can be emphasizing examples in your work history that showcase your flexibility, attention to detail, people skills, etc. If you did specific tasks where you kind of did a project management type role (scoping, planning, budgeting, implementing, supporting) these are good to mention in some way.

You don't want to lie (because you'll be caught out by a decent interviewer) but you do want to isolate what is significant about your specific experience to the job at hand (even if that wasn't so much the actual focus of that job).

And with project management, a lot of times the focus isn't so much on your actual project management skills as your understanding of the industry in which you'll be managing projects (for example, though the phrase isn't in my title I am essentially an online applications project manager, but when I was being hired it was just as important that I had understanding of banking as that I had experience managing online application development). So that can be emphasized if you have anything.

As far as you past education goes, unless there was some specific training, I'd probably just mention CSULB and drop off the unfinished associates degree. When it isn't industry specific, the most significant thing about a college degree is that it shows a certain dedication towards completing what you start and a certain presumed bedrock of education. An unfinished associates degree (unless it is directly on topic) is irrelevant to that.


I've received many resumes with a hobbies or other interests section and I don't think I've ever seen anything in one of those where I gave a flying crap about it one way or the other. The fact that we share an interest in kayaking or something may help us bond during an interview but it isn't ever going to get you the interview in the first place. So I'd generally advise leaving that stuff out.

PROOFREAD PROOFREAD PROOFREAD. Especially for something like project management where OCD-like attention to detail is a selling point you don't want typos or major errors in the resume or any other initial communications.

And, not to be defeatist, in the end it is all a crap shoot. Different hiring people expect different things from resumes and 99% of the time you have no idea what. You could get the person who really thinks active participation in professional organizations is vital or you could get a person who thinks the only useful things is perfect spot-on work experience doing the exact thing you're applying for.

In the end the resume isn't about telling me who you are. I don't really care (at the point in time where I'm just reading through a stack of resumes). The resume is about selling me on the idea that you can do what I need done. If I am at all an intelligent person I am open to the fact that all kinds of histories can produce such a person, but you have to convince me.

[Not Afraid]

The average time the hiring person looks at a resume for the first scan is 30 seconds. Make it easy to read and scan and only talk about the thing that apply to the position you are looking at.

For example, I just scanned Alex's post above. :evil:

[Alex]

Yeah, posting while on conference calls is not good for conciseness, brevity, and avoiding duplicative redundancy.

[katiesue]

I agree with all that was said above. I got a resume once for an admin position that had hobbies such as bowling listed. If it's not relavant don't put it down.

I have the problem of having an AA degree and having gone to a State School for two more years but I never graduated. Everyone wants a degree. I put the dates attended but I'm careful not to say I have a degree in anything. This used to be easier with the old paper way. Most people assumed I had a degree, if asked of course I'd tell the truth. With all the online forms it's harder.

A former employer who did a startup in his dorm in college and never graduated always had "atteneded U of __" on his bios etc. Not many people caught onto that either.

[blueerica]

"duplicative redundancy"

That may be my favorite term... of the week.

I seem to be doing a lot of that lately, and am desperately trying to cut back. Unfortunately, it takes time with my personal matters, so I end up "grinding in" the point.

Thanks for the tips - I'll be taking some things out of my resume on the next pass.

As far as the unfinished Associates' degree in Radio, TV and Film Production, though it is not in product management or marketing, is very applicable to the field I am using for my resume - which happens to be the JetSet Studios position of Project Coordinator.

[Kevy Baby]

Not much to add that hasn't already been said.

I had a friend who was doing some hiring for a fairly unique position that required a lot of "outside the box" thinking. The person who got the job was the person who had their name, address, etc. at the top and a simple line at the bottom to the effect of "I can and will excel at the XYZ position." It wasn't just the resume that got the person the job, but it certainly got my friends attention. The person brought in a "real" resume to the interview.

Not for everyone (and it certainly wouldn't work in traditional applications), but it very much caught the attention of my friend.

This is the same friend whose title on her cards is "Director of Operational Chaos and Panic". I love her!

[Tref]

My worst resume mistake was printing it on a tortilla.

[Kevy Baby]

My worst resume mistake was printing it on a tortilla.It might not have been that bad. Was it flour or corn?

[lindyhop]

I always heard that resumes should only be one page long so I was amazed when I had to read resumes and none of them were just a page long. I was also annoyed. I wanted to trash everything that was more than one page but that would have been all of them.

It's also amazing to see all the typos and spelling mistakes. If you're applying for an accounting position being careful and accurate is sort of, uh, important.

Then HR started e-mailing resumes to us so you had to open the e-mail and print it out before you could see that the applicant was in India so you probably wouldn't be calling them in for an interview.

I'm so glad I don't have to deal with that any more.

And I hope I never have to update my own resume.:eek:

[Prudence]

I'm more accustomed to the multi-page everything-you've-ever-done-in-your-life resumes because that's what they do where I work. Switching over to the one-pager for legal jobs sucks.

The biggest problem with constructing my legal resume is that firms expect that students don't have that much experience, so they expect a one-page resume; if you're a student and you turn in more than that, as you legitimately might if you were an experienced partner or associate, it's assumed that you simply don't know what you're doing and your resume goes right into the round file without a second glance. But part of my marketing of me is that I *do* have prior work experience and skills that will translate to my new career, so I'm a better deal than the 25-year old grads whose mommies and daddies paid for their education and who have never put in an 8-hour day, much less a 12 or 16-hour day. (This sort really do exist in my school, and in alarming numbers.) And getting that info into a one-page format just.plain.sucks.

[katiesue]

We got an unsolicited resume once at former employer. It had tabs for various different resumes "I went to the same school as you", "the suck up resume", "The I know somoene you know resume".

We didn't have any jobs for the guy but it did at least get our attention.