Composing Your Resume

Guidelines

Your resume is a summary of your personal data, your educational background and training, your business or professional experience and qualifications, and your achievement highlights. It should touch on all things which influence your qualifications for a particular position or type of employment.

Essentially, your resume is an advertisement to prospective employers. It should be prepared with as much care as a promotional campaign for a major new product. It should set you apart from other candidates in the job market and sell the employer on your strongest qualifications.

Your resume should be:

• Brief: Include all the facts you need in order to cover the necessary information, but remember, this is a concise summary of highlights—not an autobiography. Limit your resume to one page except when your employment experience is extensive or when greater depth in academic preparation or job responsibilities is required. Be selective and include only those achievements which support your bid for the type of position you seek.
• Neat: Your goal should be a total positive impression. Generous spacing and separation of the components of your resume will help you achieve this effect. The appearance of the resume makes the first impression.
• Organized: Pertinent information should be easy to locate. This is done by the use of indented margins, capitalization, proper spacing, etc. Information should be rank-ordered from most important to least important, not only down the page but within categories as well. For this reason, reverse chronological order is usually recommended, particularly in the categories of “Education” and “Experience.”
• Effective: Your resume should be 100 percent honest and positive. Avoid the negative approach in your writing style. Complete sentences are not necessary; sentence fragments are acceptable, even desirable. Use action words, such as designed, coordinated, initiated, produced. (See the Buzz Words list in this Guide.)

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