As you progress through your career it is important to have available an up-to-date resume. You never know what outstanding opportunity will come along. Your resume should be a selling tool focused on the wants and needs of the type of employer you would like to work for. As your career progresses so does your skills and achievements.
With each new position you are accumulating skills, knowledge, achievements and confidence in your abilities. The highlights of each position should be added to your resume, sometimes just adding the latest position to the resume is enough. This process might work once or maybe even twice if the work in the new jobs is the same as the old. Most of the time, however, it is worth the time to do a complete overhaul to make sure your resume is at the level it should be.
While your career is moving forward it is important to keep your resume in line with your goals. What are your goals and objectives these days? Have they changed since the resume was last written? If they have, you will want to figure out exactly where your current goals are in order to write a resume that moves you toward your new goals.
Completely revamping your resume is a great way to ensure your career objectives are clearly represented in your resume.
Let’s start at the top.
· Your resume should have a title. The title should be the name of the position you are seeking. If you haven’t held the position before, you can write “Executive Sales Manager Profile or Candidate” or something to that affect. Until the last few years the actual title the resume was written for had to be hunted for by the reader of the document. You don’t want the reader to hunt for anything!
· Develop a stellar qualifications summary, skills set and or powerful branding statement to articulate your most notable skills, experience, or achievements. Career Objectives are pretty outdated, honestly, I haven’t written one in years. It focused on what the job seeker / candidate wanted instead of what the hiring manager or recruiter was looking for.
· A thorough review of each job description should be completed to make sure the descriptions and accomplishments are targeted toward the job description of the position you are seeking. Make sure to use concrete examples that lots of quantifiable numbers such as size of company, sales quota’s, team / department size, percentage or dollar amount of revenue increases or cost reductions, projects completed and anything else that is relevant.
· Make sure you use industry and position-specific keywords throughout the document so it sounds like it was created just for the position you sent it to. It also improves your chances of getting through the filters it encounters before ever getting in front of the targeted audience.
· Review your education and training. Include any new training, certification, or degree completions. The same is said for new associations, affiliations or volunteer work that is related. The longer it has been, the less you need to include about your education. Usually just the school, degree, city and state (and GPA if 3.5 or higher) is sufficient after 10 or more years.
· Do not mention your references on the resume. Have them with you and available at the interview and assume they will want a copy. Just a note of caution on background checks. With the internet, your information will be checked on even past the contact names you gave. Make sure your facts and experience are accurate and honest. Your resume will be overlooked if any inconsistencies are found, even if the difference was just a typo.
Lastly, make it shine! Make it as concise, powerful and as targeted as you can. Include adequate amounts of white space and other formatting to make the document stand out and easy to read. The employer wants to be able to read your resume and imagine those same achievements can be accomplished at his company. Write it for others, not for yourself and you’ll be in the running for a great job.
Shine On!
