Preparing Your Resume

A resume is a summary of your qualifications, education, and experience, highlighting major accomplishments and your ability to produce results relevant to your career goals. A resume should tell who you are, what you know, what you have done, and what you would like to do that qualifies you.

  1. Your resume should sell, as well as tell – show how you can contribute to the employer’s operation. Stress accomplishments, achievements, assets, and strong selling points relevant to your career objective. Be 100% honest.
  2. There is no “correct” format for a resume other than it should be well-organized, factual, clear, eye-catching, easy to read, and professionally produced. Your resume has about 20 seconds to make a good impression and convince the employer to read further.
  3. Remember the three C’s — Clear, Consistent and Concise.
    • Clear: Identify key positive points in seconds.
    • Consistent: Keep the style, grammar, punctuation, numbers/dates, capital letters, verb tenses, and format consistent and parallel.
    • Concise: Keep your resume to one or two pages. If your resume is just a little over one page, adjust margins and font size to get it to one page. If you must use two pages, evenly space the information to fill the page so the copy looks well-balanced with uniform margins.
  4. Present information in reverse chronological order (most recent first) focusing on the information that is most pertinent to your career goal.
  5. Use short, descriptive phrases that start with action verbs (i.e., lead, organize, coordinate, etc.).  Avoid using personal pronouns (I, me, or my). Provide details of what was done, how, with and for whom, at what level of responsibility, with how many, under what conditions and the results obtained.
  6. Include recognitions, awards, and evidence of accomplishments.
    • Education: Academic and extracurricular accomplishments and honors, community service, employment, internships, relevant projects and professional training.
    • Employment: Advancements, bonuses, positive performance evaluations, testimonials from customers, supervisors, etc.
  7. Avoid using resume templates.
  8. Never include salary information, gender, nationality, birth date, or social security number, marital status, or health-related information on a resume.
  9. Generally avoid abbreviating; spell out all words (except standard two-letter state abbreviations).
  10. Proofread your resume – and ask someone else to look it over, too!