Tips for building a resume

A resume is essentially an at-a-glance view of your educational and professional history on one piece of paper. A resume is an organized summarization of your skills and experience that is relevant to the job in which you are applying for. This piece of paper is the first step to gaining employment. Employers use this as a guide to see whether you are an appropriate candidate for the job they seek to fill. If it is good enough you move to the next step, the interview!

What I have found is that there are essentially 5 parts to a resume. Each one has its own importance. These 5 parts are as follows below:

1. Personal information: Name, address, phone, and e-mail. This information is placed at the top of the paper. Depending on how you want the resume to flow it can be placed in the upper right, left, or center of the page.
2. Objective: A quick one liner telling the potential employer what you are seeking as an employee and in a company. An example of this would be : To obtain a challenging position that will utilize my skills as well as promote growth potential with in the company/organization.
3. Skills:A bulleted list of your various professional skills. You can organize this information by type of skill, such as: computer, office, managerial, etcetera. I recomend at most 3 bulleted lists of skills. This will help to eliminate clutter.
4. Work History: This entails the dates of employment, name of employer, name of supervisor, location, your job title, and a brief summary of your responsibilities at this job. You want to keep this section condensed, including only relevant job experience.
5. Education and Training: This section will include the school name, dates you attended, and awards or degrees you earned. You may also want to include any relevant clubs, fundraisers, or volunteer work you may have been involved in.

Building a resume can seem overwhelming just in adding the content. While content is important, so is presentation. It is important to organize the content in a way that is easy for the employer to understand. The last thing a potential employer wants to do is put together a puzzle in order to read your resume. In a basic resume the information is presented in order of the 5 parts I listed above. Keep everything aligned with your personal information centered at the top.

There are also many different kinds of resumes for a variety of different professions.The templates on MS Word or Microsoft.com you can easily find a ton of examples to help you design a well put together resume for whatever profession you are in.

I know the job market can be intimidating especially with all this talk of a recession. The key to getting in the door is a good resume. The information I provided is just a guide to getting starting. Some other helpful resources on the web are career builder, monster.com, and yahoo hotjobs. I have found a lot of great information on these sites. Another great thing about these sites is they have resume builders on their sites. They are easy and guid you step by step.

Good luck with the job hun!