How to Write a Resume (Project-Centered Course)

What you’ll achieve: In this project-centered course*, you will craft an essential cornerstone of the modern-day job or internship search: the resume. You’ll review resume best practices and explore current trends with guidance from a professional career counselor and recruiter, and you’ll exchange structured feedback with your peers as you work to polish your own resume. When you complete the course, you’ll have an eye-catching resume that lets your professional strengths shine. What you’ll need to get started: This course is designed primarily for young professionals or college students who are writing their first resume or looking to give an old resume a fresh and polished professional look. All job seekers will benefit from the course material and project, however, regardless of their career stage or professional background. All you will need is word processing software that allows you to create a resume on a computer- there are free tools available. *About Project-Centered Courses: Project-centered courses are designed to help you complete a personally meaningful real-world project, with your instructor and a community of like-minded supportive learners with similar goals providing guidance and suggestions along the way. By actively applying new concepts as you learn, you’ll master the course content more efficiently; you’ll also get a head start on using the skills you gain to make positive changes in your life and career. When you complete the course, you’ll have a finished project that you’ll be proud to use and share.

• Introduction to the Course & Resumes
• Define course goals. Introduction about purpose of a resume, and when it might be used, and criteria for the peer-review rubric.
• The Foundation of your Resume: A Self-Inventory
• A top-to-bottom look at the typical sections of a resume. Different sections you might have on a resume, definition of transferable skills and how to pull those out of past experiences.
• Writing Content for your Resume
• How to write an action-statement, what makes a strong verb, how to maximize use of numbers and other characters, and common pitfalls of writing the content.
• Piecing it all Together: Organization, Structure, Format
• How to organize the sections on the document, foundations of strong structure and clear formatting.
• Know your Industry
• Different types of jobs are going to look for different headings, or different orders of sections for the optimal response from an employer. Define “Buzz Words” and show how to identify them in a job posting, and then implement them on the resume.
• Best-Practices for your Resume from an Employer
• Interview with an employer about how they approach a stack of resumes, what stands out in a good way, and what can leave a negative impression.
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Common questions about resumes job-seekers might have, that may not have fit into our modules.