Building a Resume that Tells your Story
Introduction
There are a number of methods for presenting your professional information including: historical resumes, Functional resumes, Biographical, and Executive CV. Each method servers a different audience and purpose. Once you have selected a resume format you are comfortable with there are a number of specific details to assure your message is delivered.
Objective
It is critical to provide to the reader what your professional level and what your search objective is. By clearly defining your position the reader will make an assumption that is what you are and will continue to look at your information from that perspective.
Personal Profile
Five to seven high impact statements that describe you. These are effectively your personal strengths. Be bold, confident and positive when you construct these key statements. Orientate the descriptions to the type of job you are seeking. If you have a serious qualification and it's relevant, include it as the final point. Look at the examples shown to see how these statements use powerful words and professional business vocabulary.
Experience
This is not your career history. It's a bullet point’s description of your experience. Make sure you orientate these simple statements to meet the requirements of the reader, in other words ensure the experience/strengths are relevant to the type of job/responsibility that you are seeking. Again try to use powerful statements and impressive language - be bold and check that the language and descriptions look confident and positive.
If you are at the beginning or very early stage of your career you will not have much or any work experience to refer to, in which case you must refer to other aspects of your life experience - your college or university experience, your hobbies, social or sports achievements, and bring out the aspects that will be relevant to the way you would work.
Prospective employers look for key indicators of initiative, creativity, originality, organization, planning, cost-management, people-skills, technical skill, diligence, reliability, depending on the job; so find examples of the relevant required behaviors from your life, and encapsulate them in snappy, impressive statements. Go for active not passive descriptions, i.e. where you are making things happen, not having things happen to you.
Achievements
High impact descriptions of your major achievements. Separate, compact, impressive statements. Ensure you refer to facts, figures and timescales - prospective employers look for quantative information - hard facts, not vague claims. These achievements should back up your Personal Profile claims earlier - they are the evidence that you can do what you say. Again they must be relevant to the role you are seeking.
Career History
A tight compact neatly presented summary of your career history. Start with the most recent or present job and end with the first. Show starting and finishing years - not necessarily the months. Show company name, city address - not necessarily the full address. Show your job title(s). Use a generally recognized job title if the actual job title is misleading or unclear.
Personal Details
Use these sub-headings to provide details of full name, sex (if not obvious from your name), address, phone, email, date of birth, marital status, number of children and ages if applicable, driving license (hopefully clean - if not state position), education (school, college, university and dates), qualifications. Keep all this information very tight, compact and concise.
If you are at a more advanced stage of your career you can choose to reduce the amount of personal details shown, as some will be implicit or not relevant. Date the resume, and save as a file with some indication of what type of job it was orientated for, as you may develop a number of different resumes.