Marble Jar Gang Career Counseling: Resume Strategy
The basic premise or formula is to recognize that when your skills + traits + behaviors are placed in the right environment the outcome will give you a greater chance of success and happiness in your work.
Until today, all of your homework has been centered on you and preparation that asked you to take an ‘inward look’. From now on we will be turning it ‘outward’ in the form of written and verbal presentations. These include a resume template, cover letter example and eventually presenting yourself on the phone and in-person interviews. Your final resume will become a non-emotional summary that displays your professional life (long or short) detailing the abilities and accomplishments you want to convey to a prospective employer.
What your resume will not be is a laundry list of everything you have done including all of your jobs, especially the tasks and responsibilities you do not want to take forward into the next position. For more information see the post on ENVIRONMENT.
At the Marble Jar Gang, we think of a resume as your marketing program that sells YOU as the product, highlighting the challenges you have faced, the actions you have taken and your results that can be replicated for the company that hires you. Potential employers want to see your strategies, how you have evaluated decisions, successes along with the results for the business. This conveys an ability to hit the ground running.
The Resume Design Question:
What your resume looks like is dependent on your personality and your industry norms. If you think of the document as an advertisement for YOU, then it should reflect your personality and the ‘product’ you are selling. The font style should be easy on the eyes to scan and comfortable for the hiring manager to read the content and not focused on your fancy fonts.
Deeper dive on styles and designs: https://www.resume-now.com
Choose your favorites and bookmark the styles for use for the next post Your Resume Structure.
This is your homework: choose a few styles and put a marble in your jar.
An important item to consider before the next post is what format suits your industry? There are 4 basic styles to consider.
1. Chronological, being the most common, lists the work history by
date with recent positions up front.
2. Functional, for those who have a diverse (or limited) background or lapses in employment dates, this format showcases your skills, traits and behaviors.
3.Combination of 1 and 2, the favorite of The Marble Jar Gang.
4. Targeted, a resume written for a specific job, mirroring the job requirements and your unique qualifications.
For a deeper dive: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2016/12/21/why-you-need-a-strategy-before-writing-your-resume/#590a8b642120