For a college graduate, a resume is an important aspect for a successful career. It showcases your talent, relevant skills, and experience. You have to concentrate on various aspects such as highlighting your transferable skills rather than your work summary.
If you have not done this already, I suggest that you think about your career focus before writing a resume. Besides your work experience, employers are interested in knowing your skills that will make you suitable for a particular position.
The next step is to identify the skills and attributes that will be relevant to the positions you have applied for. You can easily judge this by taking a glance at the job description or the job specification. You will gather more insights of their expectations in terms of practical and professional abilities.
Now, I understand that college graduates are mostly inexperienced. Indeed, writing a resume becomes a big challenge because you do not have much to talk about. Right? Wrong. Even if you have little or no work experience, a college nurtures you and equips you with many skills that a company seeks:
- Leadership skills
- Time Management
- Written and Verbal Communication
- Problem-Solving
- Analytical Skills
- Computer Skills
The key of a resume is to talk about these traits so that you can showcase them during an interview. The same thumb rule applies to any job or internship that you may apply for during your college years. Add any transferable skills in your resume even if it isn’t directly related to your job position.
Believe me everything counts! Do not forget to include your unpaid work experience. You may not realize its relevance but employers do. You can also include volunteer work, internships, fraternity, sorority, and campus club positions.
Education is your biggest selling point as a college graduate. You can include the extensive education section that will nurture your resume. Don’t forget to include your GPA (if it is high) because it adds value to your qualification. You can also include a summary of your completed courses.
Finally, choose a format for your resume. A hybrid format is most apt if you have limited or no work experience. It includes a combination of both chronological and functional formats. This gives you an opportunity to highlight your transferable skills and make it more significant than your limited professional experience.
The Internet has played a huge role in taking resume writing to a higher level. Instead of writing a generic resume, video resumes have revolutionized the way recruitment is done. Though it is still in its infancy, UGrowU is promoting a free service to assist college graduates so that they can cover every milestone of success in terms of their career.
Depending on how much work history you have, and if volunteering is important to your next job, you will either place it in chronological order or place it at the end of your resume after education under other experience and skills. Generally I would put it in chronological order. I hope this helps and wish you all the best in getting the position you are seeking. good luck
Now that you have a job interview, the next step is to figure out what to wear to interviews. What kind of business attire was too casual or intimidate a big difference in getting a job. Remember, dress for the job you want not the job you have.
A CV should be clear, concise, complete, and offer necessary and adequate information like summary of one’s educational, professional and academic background. Other details like experience, training, employment history, publications, presentations, contact, personal information etc should also be included.
Thank you for talking about assessing ones skills after graduation. Graduates typically have more skills than previous work experience. The graduate dichotomy: you can’t get a job because you don’t have experience, but you can’t get experience without getting a job. Thanks for the great post.
As you can notice in any sample C.V., you have to fill in the area for personal information – full name, telephone number, address, marital status, email address.
What would be your top three tips for anyone new to this topic?
1) Focus on your strengths/accomplishments
2) Use adjectives when possible
3) Be organized