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How to write your resume
Your senior year is just over the horizon, and you’re scared witless. For three or four years, you have gone to class and learned everything there is to know about your chosen field, socialized with your fellow peers via clubs, fraternities/sororities, and volunteer organizations, and through it all, you’ve had a blast.
However, this chapter in your life story is drawing to a close, and the start of your working life is within sight. While you have the youthful drive to take on the problems that employers need solved, you have to first introduce yourself in a formal and professional manner. Of all the tools used to accomplish this, the resume has held fast through the decades as one of the most important of these. Companies use it to assess not only your raw skills, but your organizational abilities, attention to detail, as well as many other cues that reveal to them the type of candidate that you are.
Want to learn how to not only ensure that you are shooting yourself in the foot by committing an innocent mistake, or forgetting to include essential information? This article will cover how to write your resume, plus a few extras that will help you establish an edge in the 21st century world in which we live.
List your accomplishments
The central role of a resume to communicate everything you have to offer a potential employer, so include information on anything worthwhile that you have accomplished in the past few years. This obviously includes work, academic degrees and internship experience, but also include volunteer work (displays additional skills + your concern for society at large) and clubs (shows that you socialize, making it more likely that you play well with others).
Target the content of your resume towards a specific job or job type
Not everything that you have done in your past will relate well to certain positions. For example, your involvement in your universities’ video gaming club may not matter to a recruiter for a standard office job, but it becomes a big plus if you are pursuing a job as a programmer in the gaming industry.
Proofread your completed resume militantly
Once you have finished your resume check through multiple times and make sure that there are no misspelled words, misplaced words (many errant keystrokes when typing will result in a properly spelled word that is another word altogether from what you originally intended), or other tragedies of grammar. We don’t mean to intimidate you, but resumes with these miscues often get deleted on sight, as it is perceived as a lack of attention to detail on your part.
Leave a link to an online supplement to your resume
While the tips above have been repeated ad infinitum through the ages, change is ripping through the world of employment like a blustery gale. To avoid being sunk by this maelstrom of change, adjust your sails by enlisting the services of online accompaniment to resumes like about.me or LinkedIn.
The former provides you an online slate to express yourself in a way that paper resumes do not allow, while the latter provides social proof to your claims of experience from your colleagues, professors and peers.
Create a portfolio
If you are in a field that is is dominated by media or the visual arts, cobbling together a portfolio to go with your resume will put you heads and shoulder above those that are aimlessly carpet bombing resumes everywhere.
By detailing your best and most representative work, be it in the form of a web page showing off your creations, a Vimeo submission that demonstrates your cinematography skills in action, or a Flickr account that bears witness to your unmatched eye for photography, selling yourself to a prospective business becomes infinitely easier.
Experiment with alternate formats/strategies
In today’s increasingly congested job market, doing the same old thing as everyone else is a sure way to avoid getting noticed. Exciting and eye-popping templates abound throughout the internet, giving your submission to a business a look that will grant you a closer examination than other candidates. You could also write a proposal letter to an employer, explaining exactly how you would solve a problem in their field, or if you are so bold, you could cold call an important person in a position of influence and persuade them how you would add value to their organization from day 1.
This might be scarier than hitting send on a hundred resume e-mails and waiting for the phone to ring, but you’ll likely find yourself prospering in an entry-level position while your friends pile on more debt by going to graduate school because they couldn’t find a job after getting their undergrad degree.
Best Majors For Making Money Right Out of College!
There’s no doubt about it: college will likely provide some of the best times of your life. While the next four years of relative time freedom should be savored, don’t forget why you are in school in the first place – to get a degree that will help you get a position that will pay a generous salary. Such an accomplishment is becoming tougher in today’s economy, where jobs for certain degrees are evaporating due to outsourcing and automation.
As such, much greater care must be taken when it comes to selecting a degree and a major, as it will make the difference between playing in an optimal position, and being forced to take your shots from behind the proverbial 8 ball. Now that we have your attention, may we suggest five degree paths that grant their recipients a higher percentage chance of landing a good job in their field?
We can? Great! Let’s begin with…
1) Information Technology
From managing networks to programming in various computer languages, the demand for people to help continue the unprecedented expansion of the internet continues to grow. While things aren’t quite as crazy as they were in the gold rush days of the 1990’s, the need for creators, analysts and developers in this field is still strong.
For a web app developer, who pulls in $80,000 on a median basis, to IT managers at bigger firms, who comfortably earn six figures on average, the prospects for a good living are still here. The computer-intensive nature of much of this work also lends itself well to mobility, meaning that freelancers can earn a living doing what they do best from a beach side bar in Thailand if they choose to do so!
2) Engineering
The world will always need problem solvers, and as this is at the core of what an engineer does, the demand for these professionals will always be steady and strong. Specialties run the gamut from chemical, civil, and electrical engineering to fields as far flung as human factors engineering (aka ergonomics). Median salaries range from $75,000 to $90,000 depending on the field, but in parts of the world where labor shortages are active, these earnings can spike considerably.
3) Marketing
The core of business, forever and always, is getting people to check out your stuff, then getting in there and closing the sale. This is what the motivated marketing graduate is innately good at, and the best promoters and closers get paid very, very well for the services they provide. The median earnings of many marketing managers is perpetually close to $100,000 per year for most regions, and with performance bonuses tied in, most killers finish with considerably more than that in their bank account come Christmas.
4) Geology
At this point in history, the oil industry is in its twilight years. The day where clean energy rules the roost will likely be here within the next generation or two. Until then, a crapload of money stands ready to be made in this field, as easy oil finds don’t exist anymore, and finding more supply to prop up our oil-dependent civilization requires the ingenuity of petroleum geologists (i.e. you).
These specialists can be making $96,000 on average straight out of school, with low to mid six figures per year possible as you progress through your career. The best part is this: it doesn’t include the many performance bonuses that exist at many workplaces, so the potential to make even more depends solely on your work ethic.
What about the day when oil is over? The world will continue to need to dig gold, iron ore, and rare earth elements (used in smartphones and other electronics) out of the ground, so if you plan ahead, simply transition over when the ship begins to sink and with any luck, you’ll be in a new position with minimal disruption!
5) Pharmacology
That dude that fills prescriptions behind the counter at your local drug store? He isn’t a chump. Not even close. Despite the tendency to stereotype anybody that works in a retail environment as a low wage earner, pharmacists stand out from the pack, making a cool $80,000 per year on a median basis to ensure that your grandmother gets the right pills for her condition, and not something that will, you know … kill her!
After shouldering this enormous responsibility, having the certainty of steady hours and a plush wage make this sterile-appearing career seem positively appealing in today’s economic landscape, especially when you consider how old the boomers are getting. Excuse us while get our lab coat…