Resume Building

As a person with none or a little prior work experience, resume building can seem to be a challenge in the absence of tested skills and experience. A newcomer with an attitude to contribute and be an active part of a team, fresh insight, willingness to question norms with maturity and abundant energy is an asset to most teams. Let your resume building focus on what you have done till now and your attitude to work.

Education qualification

Your priority when you have little work experience to show is to bank on your qualifications. Provide details of the course you have attended, specialisation, institute and location. Highlight the subjects that you particularly liked and provide your justification as to how the subject provides you with the insight to understand the nature of work you are expected to do. Resume building equips you with a medium to highlight your strengths. If your marks are not competitive because you have been an avid sports player or have focussed on extra curricular projects, highlight the fact.

Extra-curricular activity

Extra curricular activity brings out the leaders, managers, individual players, team players in the team. Some people display their skills when they are behind the scenes and laying emphasis on rules and guidelines. Others come forward and are strong at garnering support and guiding people on how to play their roles. Some play their role best when they work alone while others require team inputs and feedback. Which of these describes you? Flesh out this description with examples of how your style helped your team to carry out a large task successfully in your resume building.

Community work

There has been an upsurge in volunteering efforts by students as an effort to understand social ills and trying to help the needy. This type of work displays initiative, spirit of questioning, willingness to find solutions where others let go and a person with a healing touch. If you feel your resume building lacks punch because you have not been academically inclined nor sportingly gifted and been a mute spectator to college projects, focus on the community work that you have done. Consider providing details of your community welfare oriented work to a potential recruiter to highlight your skills in different areas. Describe the motivator to undertake this assignment and provide some details about your learning. Avoid long sentences and paragraphs. Let the introduction be a sentence long and the details be presented as bullet points in resume building.

Cover letter

Your cover letter is akin to a product package. It needs to look good, provide important information in a concise manner and be compact. Let your cover letter provide a short gist of your experience and talk about your attitude and the kind of work you look forward to do. Avoid clichés about wanting to learn and willingness to work hard, instead tell the recruiter what you bring to the table when resume building. Do not repeat words that you have used in the main bio data. Instead, use your creative skills to describe yourself. Make no promises of loyalty and use no adjectives, just be factual in your tone.

If you are resume building to return to your career after a hiatus of a few years, be prepared to return at the level and compensation you were at when you left. Organisations are often willing to positively consider a gap taken for skill enhancement and will even hike your pay and level in the hierarchy. However, if the gap was necessitated by personal problems that came in the way of new learning, you may have to prove your capabilities before you can expect to be treated as you were earlier.
Explain the gap
Were you taking care of your children and waiting till they grew to be a certain age before you returned to work? Did you manage to put some time aside for any assignments from home or on a part time basis? Allow your covering letter and resume building to cover the reasons for the gap and your associated learning. All our experiences give us important lessons that can be applied to any field. Use the opportunity to market the reasons for the gap.
Highlight skills learned
Maybe you had to manage the house and the kids which taught you about the importance of marketing an idea to make children and adults listen to you. Did you learn about money management and administration in this time? Did you learn how to manage events for children with creative themes? Identify how you spent your time and the things you enjoyed doing to convert your activities into skill statements for effective resume building.
Get creative
If you were an HR professional doing a resume building in an effort to return after a long gap, consider viable alternatives to the job that you were doing. Were you strong on interviewing techniques or process improvements? Draw on the skills you picked up in the course of your work experience and see in what way you can convert it into a lucrative business opportunity. You can offer your skills as an interviewer and provide consulting and training services to companies. Write about this initiative in your resume to impress upon recruiters that you have the ability to tap your skills and utilise it to advantage. Your entrepreneurial drive and marketing capability will prove your skill and enable you to bide your time till a suitable vacancy arises.
Be informative
Focus on your skills and cater your resume building to the needs of the job description. Guide the recruiter through the story of your hiatus by providing a brief insight into what triggered your move. The gap may have been caused by your decision to study further, what were your aims when you chose a course. If your children were in their teens when you took a break, what were the insights that triggered the action? Bear in mind that the recruiter is looking for answers to certain questions: Will you be able to revert to a time based work schedule that offers less flexibility? Have you kept in touch with your skills or have you added to them? Do you sufficient support on the home front? Will you be regular at your job? If your resume building focuses on your activity and skill, these questions are largely answered.

A competency is a mix of knowledge, skill and attitude that you bring as a potential candidate. This is an effort to bring out your work habits, attitude towards the work you do. A resume building exercise with a focus on core competencies seeks to highlight to the recruiter that you expect to be in a job at a workplace where your skills will be honed.

Identify your core competencies

Think about the work you have done for resume building, whether you are a fresh graduate with some experience on project work or an experienced corporate player. Are you the one who front ends projects or the person who works out possible process improvements? Do you like checking to be sure of perfection or do you prefer to be associated with the creative side of work? Be careful not to let your emotions about the project experience cloud your view. It is possible you would have liked top be associated with the creative side of the work but were forced to do something you did not like. Focus on the skills you have exercised and seen that you are actually good at. Your resume building exercise seeks to make your case for being considered for a job that exercises your preferred skill set.

Listing down your core competencies

Make a worksheet with two columns, one column being skill and the other being attitude. Let us say the skill you had to utilise in your job was database management, a task you did not relish. Though you now have the skills for it, your attitude is that you do not want to find yourself working in the area again. Now, consider the skill data analysis. Is this a part of the job that you enjoyed? In that case, write this down as a skill and indicate your positive attitude towards it. Resume building in this manner helps you to identify the skills that you have enjoyed learning. It clears your mind about your career choices while clarifying what you offer to the recruiter.

List your accomplishments

Now that you have a listing of the core competencies that you want to exercise in your job, let your resume building focus on the concrete accomplishments you have had in the use of the skill. If the is creation and delivery of presentations, for a fresh graduate, this would mean highlighting how a certain aspect of a project received recognition. For an experienced person, it highlights how the presentation wrought desired changes or succeeded in directing attention to an important issue. This allows the recruiter to know your achievements and the specific skills that were utilised for success.

Suit competencies to job requirements

The job description provides a broad list of expectations of the applicant. List out specific terms, while resume building, used in the description and highlight your competencies and accomplishments in line with them. If the job description does not provide much detail, consider a generic job description and mould your skill sets to suit it.