How To Decide If You Should Put Something Into Your Resume
Always use this philosophy: if it helps your case, put it in. If it does not help your case, leave it out.
Let's take the example of a person's age. The accepted practice is not to give a clue in your resume about your age, but the reader will try to guess how old you are anyway. If, for example, you leave out your years of graduation, it will make your age look like an issue, and the reader may guess that you are older than you are. When I was applying for management positions years ago, my resume made me sound younger than I actually was I had worked for a few years before completing my undergraduate work. It helped my case to put my date of birth in my resume because I wanted employers to know how old I really was.
Look at your own situation to see if putting something in would help your case or not. And remember, it is not always best to follow the rules.
Use The Language Of Your Target Market
Restate your background in terms your target market will understand. Do not use the lingo of your industry or your company. For example, if you want to switch from education to a training position in the corporate world, remember that corporate life does not have "teachers"; it has "trainers" or even "instructors." Consider using these words instead. Do not expect the reader to translate the terminology. Make it easy for him to see how you fit in; let him see that you understand his business.
If you have worked for a major corporation, do not use the company jargon. Use words generally understood in your target market.
Think about how you want to position yourself to the reader, the story you are trying to tell, and how you can make sure the story comes across successfully.
Resumes For People With "Nothing To Offer"
Recent college graduates, housewives, and those with very little or very low level work experience often feel as though they have nothing to offer. They think if they had better experience, they would have no trouble writing a resume.
They are wrong. Even the most highly accomplished executives have a great deal of difficulty preparing their own resumes. Resume preparation is a skill just as marketing or finance is a skill, and it is not something executives have to do every day on their jobs.
You are probably not competing with high powered executives. Therefore, it doesn't matter that you haven't run a division of six hundred people. If you had run that division, you'd have other problems in preparing your resume. It's better for each of us, no matter what our experiences, to think that we have done OK considering where we came from. Our experiences have made us what we are today, and that's not so bad. We should be thankful and be proud of whomever we are, and make the most of it. We should each strive executive, young person, housewife to uncover our special gifts and contributions, and let the world know about them.
On a national TV program, I was once asked to take an "ordinary housewife" and develop a resume for her. It was promoted as something akin to magic: can Kate make this nothing into someone? The producers picked a woman who had been at home for twenty years that would be a good one! Sight unseen (just like magic), I phone interviewed the woman and developed a great resume for her.
Afterward, people said it wasn't fair: we should have picked someone who really had nothing to offer. Of course, in real life, most housewives are not sitting home doing nothing for twenty years. When a counselor helps a person, the counselor can find the things that person has to offer. Every housewife, every young person, has done things. With an open mind and the right help, they can present these things well in a resume.