Writing Your Resume: What's in

What’s In?

When you start to format your resume, begin by deciding what categories or headers you plan to use. Don’t worry about your name and contact information yet to how to center or choosing fonts. That comes at the end. Right now, focus on getting everything that’s important down on paper. We’ll rearrange it later. First let’s look at the categories most likely to appear on your resume: experience, skills, work history, education, and affiliations.

Experience – This is a dodgy category for most students because it’s the area in which they are most lacking. For a recruiter, your experience is the thing that will best tell them how much of a risk you are. The great thing about experience is that it doesn’t have to be paid. Your volunteer work or intern work can count as experience. If you organized a fraternity charity event and received news coverage, then you have experience in event planning and PR. If you designed a website and database for a nonprofit, you can list it!

Skills – even if you don’t have professional work experience, you probably have some skills a recruiter could use. Can you give a good speech? Are you a great writer? Do you know some computer programs? Can you fluently speak a language? Are you a leader? Knowing what skills to put down on your resume has a lot to do with your ability to read and translate a job advertisement. You need to look for key skills and highlight those you possess.

Work History – This category is tricky because it really mixes with experience. Share only your relevant work history, not your complete work history. Your career taking out trash at a pizzeria won’t give you much credibility as an architect. Whether you put a job on your resume or leave it off is a judgment call based on what tasks you did and how they relate to the job for which you are applying. List only the jobs that add to the recruiter’s overall impression of you as a candidate.

Many students pepper their resume with lots of jobs because they believe it highlights how hard they worked putting themselves through college. Other students want to use their numerous minimum wage jobs to explain why they didn’t participate more in activities or complete an internship. These are all examples of trying to get your resume to tell a story. Unfortunately, this is exactly what a resume can’t do. A recruiter will not give the resume enough time to say what you want it to say. In the end it is better to emphasize your accomplishments in a more business savvy way and leave the explanations for your interview.

Education – most students want to put this first. There are a few circumstances where that’s okay. Typically these situations are when you are competing with other students for the same job such as when you are applying for an internship or you are interviewing on campus. When you start competing in an open market, your education becomes less of a draw, and so it should be placed toward the bottom. For most jobs, a bachelor’s degree is the minimum qualification, and everyone applying will have one. If you went to an exceptionally prestigious school ala Harvard or MIT, then you might move it up. Those are situations when your college acts like a brand that people trust. They know that to get through that school, you had to be pretty great to begin with, so they’ll give you a look. Otherwise, your education is less likely to be a selling point for you.

Other affiliations and distinctions. This is the catchall category for other stuff that will sell you. Have you been a chapter president for the Student Architectural Society? Did you receive a fellowship or award related to your work? Are there things that show that you are an exceptional student? This is the last thing to make it to your resume because it’s not the stuff that will sell you as a future employee.