Posts tagged ‘graduate school resume’
Important things you need to have on your resume
Sure it’s important to include your name, contact information, work history, education and key responsibilities.
The biggest mistake people make is leaving out their key differentiators.
What do employers really want to know about you? They want to know that you produce results.
- What problems have you solved?
- Did you serve as a project or team leader? Mentor to others?
- Have you helped the company save money, improve efficiency or increase productivity?
And it doesn’t stop here. Anywhere that you can, you need to quantify and quality your achievements:
- How many dollars did you save the company by your efforts?
- How much in additional business did you bring in?
- What was the percentage increase you brought about in productivity, safety, efficiency…?
In a tight job market, and as a young person just starting out in general, it’s important to include these extras to make you stand out in a sea of typical resumes and typical candidates.
Advice to college students
Earlier this month I visited an Integrated Communications Campaign class taught by my former boss at SLU. She asked me to talk to the class of college juniors and seniors… telling them about my college experience, job search and job. After telling my story (and probably boring the poor kids for 30 minutes), I offered a couple bits of advice:
If I could offer you some advice, I’d tell you to do something that you love. Something that you don’t mind getting there early to do or staying late. Don’t know what you want to do? You need to get out there! Intern. Job shadow. Go on informational interviews. Volunteer. You’ll learn best by doing.
When at all possible, work with people that you respect and will make you a better person. I have been extremely fortunate to work with people like this.
Your personal brand is important. Who you know and what you’ve done… that’s who you are. Network. And never burn bridges.
If you’re interested in getting into interactive marketing, do it. Our generation is naturally more tech savvy because we’ve grown up doing it. Read blogs. Check out web sites. Talk to people in the business.
Keep idea books. Bookmark web sites you like or articles that have good ideas in them. Part of what makes people successful in marketing is knowing what’s already been done… and how you can apply similar principles to your clients and innovate by improving on what’s already out there.
Then, to my surprise, I came across an article today: 10 job hunting tips for this year’s college graduates. In his blog post, Edward Boches, Chief Creative Officer of Mullen, offers some very similar tips for how to get hired in advertising right out of school.
Colette’s Resume
Colette sent me an email after seeing some of my Resume Rehab blog posts. She is getting ready to apply to grad school and needed to get her resume ready.
She already had lots of great information on her resume – lots of great work and volunteer experience. I simply edited it down and rearranged it a little bit. Some of the things I did included removing articles like “a, an, the” and redundancies like mentioning the organization’s name in your responsibilities. You’ll also see that I limited the resume to one page. This will also help keep the reader’s attention. Finally, I did some text formatting work to maximize space and ease of reading.
If she wanted, she could flip-flop the Professional Experience and the Education sections. Putting Education lower on the resume de-emphasizes the fact that you are a recent graduate and puts more of a focus on your work experience.
Best of luck to Colette in grad school land!
Resume Rehab Portfolio Updated
Check out the Resume Rehab portfolio to see new sample resumes.
While I’ve worked on a lot of recent college graduate resumes, I also have some samples of graduate school student and current college students looking for internships.
I’ve also been working on more young professional resumes, so stay tuned for more updates.
Resume Rehab by Colleen 