Take a Look at your Resume! Part 3

Hello! Welcome to the third (and maybe final) part of my "Take a Look at your Resume" series! Before I pick up where I left off, I want to apologize. It has been over two months since Part 2, and I had said that I would finish it much earlier! My only excuse is that it was a busy office here at Career Services, and it couldn't find a whole lot of time to do my favorite part: blogging!

So here we go!


Last time, I had you think about and write down your work experience and skills. This part of the process involves choosing what type of resume format you will use.

There are two popular basic types of resume formats: chronological and functional. A chronological resume is best suited for those with a pretty complete and lengthy work history, as it shows (you guessed it) your work experience in chronological order. A functional resume focuses on your specific skills and experience applying them, but it doesn't always show that you are qualified. My preference is to combine them, and target the content at the job you're trying to get. You've hopefully already taken care of the content after Part 1. But just for kicks, go ahead and look at the content you have and double check that it's really devoid of all fluffy stuff and things that wouldn't be necessarily be relevant to the field or job. If you're making this resume for a specific job post, sit the job post right next to your resume and make sure you've addressed all of the possible qualifications and requirements, and nothing more, with the exception of skills and experience that tie in very closely.

Remember that you integrated some of your skills into your list of experience in Part 2. Look through that list again and decide how you obtained each skill. If you picked up that skill from a class or some leisure activity, make a note of it. If you learned it through a class, try to remember what it is in the class that helped you pick it up. If you had to scan patients every Thursday, or had to program an inventory manager application for a client, those are useful experiences, and can be added to your list of experience. If you learned leadership skills through volunteering or even through leading your City-league basketball team, the Soft Loafers, that's also a useful experience! Throw things like this into your list of experience! Describe each your accomplishments in that activity using concise blurbs, and don't forget dates.

Interweave these new things into your work experience chronologically. If these happened within a time range of one of the listed work experiences, put them underneath that particular entry. So for example, if you were working as an Office Administrator from 2008-2010, and you designed an efficient office layout in an interior architecture class you took in the evenings in 2009, you'd have something similar to this (but prettier):

Some Job
Some Company | 2010-Present
-blah blah blah

Office Administrator
LoaferSoft | 2008-2010
-Increased employee production-happiness ratio by over 1,000,000% through the implementation of a new office layout

Office Layout Design
Grizzly Bear School of Design - ARCH352 | October 2009
-Designed an office layout with productivity score of 5.9 out of 6 - ranked Top 10 most productive office layout in class history

Some Job
Some Company | 2006-2008
-blah blah blah

The two pieces don't necessarily need to be related, but it's even better if they are! Some people seem to think that a chronology like this should only include work experience, but to me, experience is experience, whether it's in the industry or in school or in your free-time. Just make sure that there is some sort of accomplishment you can use to add emphasis. You might also try to find a non-intrusive way of differentiating work experience from other experience, if you're concerned. If your Soft Loafers basketball team had a losing record of 5-13 over the course of a season, it's probably best to leave that out. Instead, mention that during your time as captain, the team's season win-loss ratio increased by some percentage.

By now, your list of skills should hopefully be getting shorter, but if you notice that it still takes noticeably more paper space than your experience, you'll put that first. Otherwise, your experience should always go first. Having a bunch of skills is great, but whoever is looking at your resume will find it easier to make an analysis on your qualification if he can see how you've applied those skills first.


Alright. Looks like this is long enough for this part. I think I'll write a Part 4 to really tie things together, and maybe I'll put together a sample resume for some fictional character to help the ideas sink in!

Thanks for reading! See you for Part 4!