career

I volunteered at the campus career fair today and one of the other volunteers happened to be an Accounting Information Systems major.  We chatted for a bit and I immediately knew that this person was desperately searching for a job.  After the career fair, I ran into her again at the computer lab and she was updating her resume. 

Now for a little background about myself.  One of my goals before I graduated from college was to have a job lined up before I graduated.  I was so desperate to find a job that I interviewed with every company that offered me an interview.  During this time I was constantly tweaking my resume and asking advice from professors about resumes, interviewing, and careers.  Although I was unable to find a job before I graduated, I learned alot about myself and my career goals that semester.  Writing my resume helped me figure out what kind of job I was looking, which benefited me the most during in interviews.  So I decided to post some of the resume tips that I shared with that AIS major I met.

Resume writing and Interviewing tips:

Knowing your resume leads to knowing your career goals.  If you have a resume and aren’t sure about what jobs to apply for (or you’re like me and apply to everything), then I can say with reasonable confidence that your resume sucks.  Put more time into writing your resume.

I believe the process to resume writing is similar to writing a book.  It should tell a story with a flow from each section to the next.

• The Objective section is like the first chapter and is describes the purpose of your book (to find a job).
• The Education section is the chapter which describes your educational background to prove why you are qualified for the job.
• The Education section is the chapter which proves to the reader you are qualified for the job from your educational background.
• The Experience section describes your past experiences.  It describes your past job duties and emphasizes your communication, leadership, and teamwork skills.  One of my pet peeves is when people list communication, leadership, and other very subjective skills underneath their Skills section.  Yes, they are skills, but the fact is anyone can claim these as skills simply because its difficult to prove otherwise.  Its the lazy way of writing your skills section.  You’re better off describing how you exhibited these skills at your previous jobs in your Experience section.
• The Skills section is where you list your technical skills and specific skills that you learned from taking a class.  My suggestions for this section are to look at the course descriptions of all the classes you have taken.  For example, I list the ability to create databases and proficiency in Oracle 10g, Access, and SQL Server which was part of the course description for an Accounting Information Systems class I took.
• Relevant Coursework is the easiest section of your resume to write and serves as a great space filler.  If you have a Relevant Coursework section in your resume, you’re an undergraduate college student or recent graduate.  After working for a couple of years, this section should be removed to make space for jobs (or more bullets/lengthier descriptions) underneath your Experience section.  List courses you have taken and your grade, but only list your grade if you made an “A”.  Try to the more infamously difficult classes you have taken, especially if you made an “A”.  List the more relevant classes you’ve taken and order them by the courses the reader might find as the most valuable.
• I like to put the Activities section closer to the bottom of the page.  It is similar to the Relevant Coursework section.  List any clubs, organizations, and projects you have been participating in and with a comma next to each activity with the name of your role or officer position.  List activities where you were only a member or participant last.  You do not have to list your role next to these activities.  Putting “Member” or “Participant” causes your participation in those groups to lose value, especially if you were “Vice President” or “Treasurer” in other organizations.
• In my resume, the last section is Interests where I list my hobbies.  I get alot of heat from people who proofread my resume about leaving this section out.  It really depends on the situation.  My reason for this section is based on hope.  Hope that the reader will have a similar interests and spark up a conversation about those interests.  Hope that the reader sees something interesting, asks me about my interesting hobby, and we have a great conversation/interview from there on.  And finally, hope that the reader will remember me by my peculiar/interesting hobby so that the next time they see me, they have something to talk to me about.

Yeah, my writing is so jumbled and I do not want to proofread it because I will go all out OCD and spend pointless hours organizing and structuring each line to provide greater clarity and flow to my ramblings.  One of my issues with blogging is that sometimes I don’t know who my audience is or why I am writing.  Sometimes I blog because I want to record things that I might enjoy reading later.  Other times its because I have something I want to share with people that are willing to read my blog.  For example, my ramblings from above started out as a story about meeting an AIS major and proofreading her resume.  Then all of a sudden I got the idea to list short and easy to read tips for writing a resume.  Finally, while writing my resume tips I forgot the purpose of why I was writing and started going into too much detail (I started with a metaphor about resumes and writing a book!)!

Alright, from here on out I’m going to proofread less because it wastes too much of my time!  Although, I was reading other accounting/CPA study blogs that actually had readers/commentors and they tend to write topically to their readers about their exam experiences.  Maybe I should try to stay on topic for all my posts.  Looking back at my first post I listed topics I wanted to blog about.  I’ll pick something off of that list for my next post and see how it goes.

In light of having poorly organized blog posts, I’m still confident about my writing style for simulations.  I’m a good writer when I know my purpose and audience.  My only worry is that I will take too long because I can see myself going OCD on organizing and structuring the body of my memos!

Tagged as: career, resume writing, resumes

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