Thread: Resume Advice
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Old 02-15-2007, 05:13 PM   #5
Alex
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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.
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