Take a Look at your Resume! Part 1

I don't know about the rest of you, but OIT has a career fair coming up just around the corner, and that means it's time to revamp your job search tools!

There is one thing that you should always bring to a job/career fair: your general resume. Since we're a couple weeks from our career fair, I figure it's a great time to start looking at resumes and giving them some new mojo. In fact, I'm not the only one, since Career Services is sponsoring a Resume Doctor event all the way through next week! (October 18-22). So let's have a quick look at some things we can do to spiff up our potentially very dusty resumes!

The first step, if you ask me, is to start a new one. You don't want what's already on your resume to impact how much you put on your fresh one. Think about it this way: If you buy a new home, and you just move all your old furniture in, will it fit? Will you need to buy new furniture? And most importantly, will it be comfortable? Well, sure. But think about how much more satisfying it would be to just furnish the new home with brand new objects! Okay, money is an issue. That's why we're making resumes, right? Don't throw away your old resume just yet. We'll have a use for it soon.

Start drafting out this resume just like you did your old one, but apply your most recent experiences, skills and recognition first. Just list them all out. This is your brainstorming phase, so don't judge what you put down just yet.

Next, write down what it is you are making the resume for. Since it's most likely going to be for a job, write down what type of job it is, and if you're tailoring your resume to a job posting, write down all of the key qualifications and requirements for that job. When I'm consulting resumes for my friends, I generally like to draw lines between qualifications/requirements and the experiences/skills that associate with them. Doing this will help you narrow your list of "stuff" down, and keeps out some of the potential "fluff" that could actually hurt your resume. Also, just for good measure, take out any of the "stuff" that you aren't really comfortable doing, or aren't particularly good at. Leaving these things in there may help you land an interview, but chances are your interview will test you on them, and then you may end up looking like a fool.

Rewrite those things down so you have a fresh list of "stuff" to work with. Look at the list of "stuff" and decide whether you have more skills listed or experience listed. This will dictate the type of resume you write, or which will come first in your resume.

While you're doing that, I'll start writing the next part!