Resumes Part 2

The speaker is excited to discuss resumes and offers detailed advice for beginners on how to create a solid resume. They emphasize the importance of having a resume during the job search process and provide tips on formatting, including contact information, and writing a summary. They also discuss the significance of showcasing work experience, using action verbs, and tailoring the resume to highlight qualifications relevant to the desired job. The speaker recommends a combination format for the resume and provides step-by-step guidance on each section. So, I'm still kind of geeking out about resumes and I didn't want to miss this opportunity to really go into details about your resume, especially for a beginner, maybe somebody that's never written a resume before and you're not quite sure what goes in it, how to even get started. So, this is going to be a part two of what I didn't know was going to be two part series for all about resumes and really kind of getting your first resume, your professional resume, really getting yourself a solid start on the job search process. Obviously, when you're in the job search process and you are actively looking for a new role and you're a professional, you have to have a resume. So, this episode is dedicated to the resume and it's part two of our series. So, without further ado, let's jump right in. Hey there, you professional, ambitious, working mama. Welcome to the Christian Career Coach Podcast. Do you want to achieve remarkable success and experience unwavering faith in your professional journey? Do you find yourself up late at night searching for answers on how to make more money, maintain a positive work-life balance, and achieve exponential career growth? Do you wake up with big ambitious goals only to feel overwhelmed and uncertain when faced with setbacks, frustrations, and unexpected challenges? Well, you're in the right place. I'm Susan Edwards and on this podcast, we tackle those exact concerns head on. We dive deep into strategies to propel your income, accelerate your career growth, and help you align your work with your faith. So, if you're tired of feeling stuck and you're ready to embrace extraordinary success, unwavering faith, and a purposeful life, then join me on the Christian Career Coach Podcast. Together we'll navigate the obstacles, find clarity amidst chaos, and unlock your true potential. Get ready for inspiration, actionable advice, and powerful insights that will empower you to conquer your fears and create the fulfilling career you've always dreamed of. Let's walk this transformative journey together. Welcome to the Christian Career Coach Podcast, where ambition meets faith and your dreams find their wings. Hey, amazing listeners, I want to share an exciting opportunity that can help you thrive in your career while aligning with your Christian values. As a devoted Christian Career Coach, I offer personalized one-on-one coaching sessions designed to empower you to achieve remarkable career growth, maintain a healthy work-life balance, and increase your salary. If you find yourself yearning for more money, missing certifications, or lacking certain job qualifications, I'm here to guide you through the process. With my expertise and faith-based approach, we'll address these challenges head on and help you overcome them. Together, we'll develop strategies to bridge the gaps and position you for success. Work-life balance is crucial, especially for Christian moms with ambitious career goals. I understand the importance of maintaining harmony between your personal and professional life. Through my coaching program, you'll learn practical techniques to prioritize what truly matters, ensuring you can excel in your career while still nurturing your family and faith. Now let's talk about career growth and the desire for a higher salary. I am here to help equip you with the tools and insights you need to advance in your profession and increase your earning potential. With personalized guidance and a faith-based perspective, we'll unlock opportunities for growth, help you negotiate your worth, and create a path that aligns with your aspirations and Christian principles. To take the first step towards transforming your career, I invite you to book a free 30-minute career clarity call with me. During this call, we'll dive into your goals, address any obstacles, and explore how Christian career coaching can accelerate your journey. Don't let missing certifications or qualifications, work-life balance concerns, or stagnant salary hold you back. Together, we'll navigate these challenges and unlock your God-given potential. To book your free career clarity call, simply visit my website at www.ForwardsCareerServices.com. Let's embark on this transformative journey towards more money, career growth, work-life balance, and a higher salary, all while staying rooted in your Christian faith. I can't wait to connect with you and guide you towards the abundant career you deserve. Visit www.ForwardsCareerServices.com today and take the leap towards a fulfilling and prosperous professional life. Hey, hey, friends, welcome, welcome, welcome back. Oh, yeah, resumes, resumes, it's one of my favorite things. I love to talk about resumes and I love to help people. One of the things that I'm best at is helping people. I have been told so many times that I should have been a teacher or was I ever a teacher before or you'd make a great teacher. I love to teach others what I know best. One of the things that I know best is resumes. Today is, like I said, it's part two of this two-part series. Last time we talked about different websites, different programs, different products that you can use to actually write your resume. You can always use one of those templates that you get from there. You can use one of their resume writers and it'll walk you through the process, but how do you know what to write, what to put? That's what today's episode is all about. How many points do I have today? I've got quite a few that I want to go through with you, but if you need to actually write each one down, there's 15 different points that I'm going to talk about and stress today for your resume. Don't forget, your resume is a marketing document and should be treated as such. When you think about marketing documents, think about the marketing documents that you have seen. When you think about Pepsi and you think about Coke and you think about Apple and you think about these big brands, that's marketing. Marketing is branding. What you're doing with your resume is branding yourself. You're giving yourself a brand. You're putting yourself on paper. You should treat this document, the resume, as though it was a marketing document and you were giving it out as though you were selling whatever was on the paper. Again, we're going to make sure that everything we put on here is clear, it's concise, and we're going to tailor our resume so that we can showcase our strengths and all of our qualifications that we have for a specific job that we are applying for. All right. So this is going to be your step-by-step guide on how to make a resume. So first things first, you've got to figure out what format you want to use. Three different types of formats that you could choose from. One is, of course, going to be chronological. This is going to list your work experience, it's going to be listed in reverse chronological order, and you're going to start with your most recent job. That's considered the chronological format. Another format that you could use is the functional format. This format focuses on your skills and qualifications rather than your work history. So you're really going to highlight skills and qualifications that you have, especially if you don't have much work history or if you have zero work history. Now the third format is a combination or a hybrid. This is where you combine elements of both the chronological format and the functional format. And this happens to also be the most popular and, in my opinion, the best. I would choose to combine both of these because as a recruiter, as somebody that reads a lot of resumes, I want to see it all. I want to see your work experience, but I also want to know about your skills and other qualifications that you may have that are relevant to the job. Okay, number two is your contact information. You want to make sure that in your contact information, you're including your full name first and last. You don't have to include your middle name. Your phone number needs to be on there. Your email address needs to be on there. And if you have a LinkedIn profile, you need to add the link to your LinkedIn profile. Make sure that your email address is professional. If it's not professional, create a new email account with something that is professional. Number three on my list is what used to be the objective is now a summary. Now, I would say that if you've got at least 10 to 15 years of experience, you need to have a summary. If you don't have that much experience, don't worry about this. I would not include a summary if you don't have at minimum 10 years of experience. But this is basically just a brief statement that summarizes your career goals. It could highlight your key qualifications, and it could also include a statement on why you're applying for the role that you're applying for or what makes you the best candidate for this role. Again, this should be a brief statement, really no more than three to four sentences at the most. It's not a full paragraph. It's just a few sentences to introduce yourself, what your career goals and what you bring to the table regarding the position that you are applying for. Okay, now on to the work experience. Of course, that's what your resume is. It's telling them what your work experience, what your background is. You always want to list your work experience in reverse chronological order. You should include the following things, the name of the company, what your job title was, the dates that you were employed there, and a brief description of either your achievements or your responsibilities in that role. Make sure to use action verbs to describe your accomplishments. When you're listing this information out, if it's a current job, all of your adjectives, everything that you list should be in current tense. If it's from past or previous roles, it should be in past tense. So for example, if it's a past job, you would say managed. If it's a current job, you would either say manage or managing. That's current tense. Okay, so that's enough about work experience. The next section that you're going to have is your education section. You do want to include your educational background in reverse chronological order. So whatever your most recent school is goes on first. That's the one at the top, listed first. So what do you include in the education section? You want to include the name of the institution, the degree that you earned, what your major was, and optional, you can put your graduation date. Now I say optional because if you've got at least 15 years of experience, I would take it off. If you don't have at least 15 years of experience, I would leave it on. As someone that reads a lot of resumes, this is going to give me an idea of your age, obviously. That's the graduation date because 90% of college graduates and high school, 100%, 99% of high school graduates when they list that year, you kind of know they're either going to be around 18 at that year if it's a high school graduation or around 22 to 24 at the college graduation level. If it's a master's degree, they might be up to 27, but that's really pushing it. That's why I say if you've got less than 15 years of experience, you're likely under the age of 40, 45. Include the year that you graduated so people can get an idea of you've got this education, now you have this work experience, and you can kind of make a guesstimate on about how old someone is. Although age discrimination can be a real thing, it can also be a positive thing. That's why I say if it's less than 15 years of experience, leave your graduation date on there. If you've got more than 15 years of experience, don't include it because it could count against you. If you graduated college in 1980 and I'm looking for a position that is going to require a lot of, I don't know, maybe travel or maybe something that's high pressure, I'm going to think in my head that someone that graduated in 1980 from college is not looking for that high pressure of a job. They're looking for something just to make a paycheck or just to use their time, spend time doing something outside of the house. I'm not necessarily thinking that they're looking for a leadership role that comes with a lot of pressure and a lot of stress. Anyway, okay, that's my tangent that I've gone off on, on the education section. The next section that we'll move on to, and this is number six on my list, is the skills section. You want to make sure that your skills are relevant and you want to really have a mixture of technical and your soft skills. If you're not familiar with what a soft skill is, you definitely want to do a Google search on this and look up the words. What kind of adjectives do you see listed for this? And then think about technical skills and think about the job that you are applying for. In your skills section, you want to make sure this is the part that you're tailoring. You're tailoring the words that you're choosing in the skills section so that they match the requirements of the job that you are applying for. So if the job description, if the posting says they're looking for someone that's detail oriented, it's a good idea for you to include detail oriented on your resume in the skills section if you actually are detail oriented. I'm just giving that as an example, but you get the point. So that's your skills section. All right, number seven is certifications and training. Make sure that you include any relevant certifications, any training programs that you've completed. Always try to save those certificates that you get because you never know how valuable they could be one day. Even if it's just a simple training class that you do at work one day, your work makes you do it. You don't do it voluntarily because you wanted to, but you're required to do it and you end up getting this certificate and it turns out to be something that's needed for this new job. So it's important that you keep up with the certifications and the training that you've gone through and keep those certificates so that way you can actually show proof that you do have that certification or you do have that certificate from that training program. Okay, the next few are only going to be if applicable. So I'll breeze through these a little bit faster only because they're not going to be relevant for everyone. Okay, number eight is projects. You should include any significant projects you've worked on, particularly if they demonstrate skills that are relevant to the job that you're applying for. So projects, again, this is likely going to be something for someone that's way more senior, you know, definitely a more senior level position, someone with much more, many more years of experience. So that's projects. You can have a whole section on projects, especially if you've done a ton of projects or if you're applying for a project management role, you definitely want to have that section. Okay, number nine is awards and honors. This is going to be applicable for those that are recent high school graduates. You want to mention any awards or any honors that you have received. Think outside the box here. Think outside and it's not just about the grades, but what about athletics, what about volunteer work, which leads me into my next one, which is volunteer work. Any volunteer experience that's relevant to the position you want to have on your resume. Now combined together, if you receive an award or an honor through a volunteer organization, you want to list that in your awards and honors section because it's an honor that you have received. The volunteer work is if you're actually going and volunteering your time to help out an organization. Even if it's for one day, it's important and you should list it if it's relevant to the position. Okay, number 11 on my list is relevant for every single person that I interview nowadays and that's because I'm interviewing students that are coming here to the U.S. for a training program or an internship, an international internship. You can probably guess what this one is, but many people coming from different countries and those different countries, English may not be the first language spoken there. So, number 11 on my list is languages. If you are multilingual, be sure to include the languages you speak and your proficiency level. Are you actually fluent or do you just have advanced knowledge? So, make sure that you put those. This is actually a great asset to have, especially nowadays with so many cultures in the U.S. There are a lot of different languages that are spoken here. So, if you're able to speak multiple languages, I would recommend that you include it definitely on your resume. Okay, so a few formatting tips, which is number 12 on my list, is to make sure that your resume stays well organized. You want to make sure that you have clear headings. All of your headings should be in the same font and they should be the same size and then bullet points for easy reading. You do not want to have a paragraph for each section or for each job in your work history. Use bullet points because it is very easy to read bullets, much easier to read bullets than it is to read paragraph format. You want to use a clean and professional font. There's several out there and I would actually do some research on the industry, maybe even the company. You could even look at the company's website and see what kind of fonts they use on their website, which tells you maybe a little bit more about the culture of the company. Are their fonts more cutesy like Comic Sans or are they more very formal like Times New Roman or are they a little bit more modern, maybe Calibri or Calibri Lite? So there's a few for you that I've just kind of shot out from memory. And then my last tip for formatting is make sure that you stick to a professional tone throughout the entire document. Okay, number 13 on my list is to tailor your resume. I've mentioned this a few times, but with every application that you submit, your resume needs to be customized for that position. You need to emphasize the skills and experiences that are most relevant to the position that you are applying for. That's what we mean when we say tailor your resume. You're actually tailoring every resume for every job application that you are submitting. Okay, number 14 on my list is to proofread. Make sure you run your ABC check, you know, your spelling check and your grammar check. You definitely need to check for errors in spelling and your grammatical errors. And then have somebody else read it, you know, read it, ask them to read it, ask a parent to read it, ask your grandparents to read it, ask a friend, a loved one, anybody. Ask somebody to read your resume and ask them for feedback. They'll tell you if something doesn't sound right or if you've got something listed on there that they don't understand. If they don't understand it, the person that receives your application is also probably not going to understand it. All right, the last point here, once you've gotten all this other stuff done, you want to save and send. You want to save your resume in two formats, which happen to be the most common. Obviously Word, that's your DOC format. The second one that you want to use is PDF. PDF is the format that you want to use anytime you are submitting your resume online. If you are sending it by email, you want to send it in DOC or PDF would be fine also. But anytime you're using a system where you have to do an online application and it asks for your resume, for a spot for you to upload your resume, that's where you want to use your PDF format. Make sure you use a professional file name and do not put any numbers in the file name. So if you want to, you know, title it first initial, last name, professional resume or just resume, that would be great. Don't put 2023 or 2024. Don't put resume one and then next time you make an edit, you save it resume two and then you're up to like resume 25. By the time you submit your resume, that's why you should not use numbers when you save your resume. And then of course you want to make sure that you're following any employer's instructions for submitting your resume. It will always say in the job posting what they want. If it says do not submit a resume without a cover letter, you need to make sure that your cover letter matches your resume. Your format, your font, the context that you write in, so if you write in, you know, if you use a lot of descriptive words in your resume, you want to use a lot of descriptive words in your cover letter. So just be sure to follow the employer's instructions for submitting your resume. All right. This was a lot. I know that this is a lot of information and again, this might be another episode that you want to bookmark and save for when you are ready to sit down at the computer and spend the time getting this completed and submitting your resume online. So if I can emphasize this anymore, this is your marketing document. This is you on paper. This is the only thing that can speak for you when you're not there. So it needs to be a magical document. It needs to really sell your story and really, and it needs to be, it needs to showcase you as the number one choice for the role, clear, concise, and tailored, showcasing your strengths and your qualifications all about that job that you are applying for. So I hope you enjoyed this one. I know there's a lot of information in this one. It was a little bit longer, but this is part two and this is all about resumes. So if you bookmark these two episodes, then you will be in good shape when it comes time for you to get your resume created and get your job application submitted. So good luck. I wish you the best in your job search and you're listening to the Christian Career Coach with Susan Edwards. Hey there, Ambitious Mama, I hope you enjoyed today's episode of the Christian Career Coach podcast. 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Until then, keep chasing your dreams, balancing your roles with grace, and shining brightly in your career and family life.