Effective Coverletter Writing

The Resume

The Coverletter

A resume is a brief summary of your abilities, education, experience, and skills. Its main task is to convince prospective employers to contact you. A resume has one purpose: to get you a job interview. Resumes must do their work quickly. Employers or personnel officers may look through hundreds of applications and may spend only a few seconds reviewing your resume. To get someone to look at it longer, your resume must quickly convey that you are capable and competent enough to be worth interviewing. The more thoroughly you prepare your resume now, the more likely someone is to read it later.

Your Name:
Your Current Local Address: Street, City, State, Zip code, (Area code) Phone Number
Your Permanent Address: Street, City, State, Zip code, (Area code) Phone Number

Career Objective:
A logical and meaningful statement concisely describing one’s immediate and possible long-range career goals. Use as specific a title as possible.

Education:

• Include institutions that granted the degrees (city and state), degrees, graduation dates (in reverse chronological order).
• If applicable or appropriate, identify your major, minor, and formal certificate program or vocational training.
• List GPA if it is favorable. Include academic honors and awards related to your degrees if appropriate.

Work Experiences:

• List position title, where and when (not necessarily in this order).
• Full-time, part-time, cooperative education experiences, internships, practicums, professional experience, and volunteer work (if related to the job search). Appropriate subheadings for this category include: Professional Experience, Work Experience, Related Work Experience.
• After identifying your skills, use action words to describe your responsibilities and accomplishments for each position. Be thorough in descriptions, but do not overrate your responsibilities.
• List accomplishments in order of importance.
• Emphasize your achievements using titles, numbers, and names. Titles convey responsibility; numbers and names show magnitude of achievement adding credibility to your resume.
• Specify skills related to career objective or job target: computer skills, special licenses, foreign language proficiencies, research discoveries credited to you.

Optional items:

• Areas of academic emphasis (if not an official major or minor), vocational training, and means of financing your education.
• Honors: List academic, leadership, athletic awards or recognitions, and memberships in honorary organizations.

Extracurricular Activities & Hobbies:

• Indicate responsibilities, positions of leadership, professional organization, community and campus activities, elected or non-elected offices held.

References:

• This is optional.