As previously mentioned, you want to sell yourself to the employer. This is very important to keep in mind when you are writing a resume. Ideally, you’d want to have a general template for what you include on your resume and then change the specifics depending on the company or position you are applying to. Even if you don’t want to do this, most of the content that is fit for one company is fine for other companies.

When writing your resume, try to think about it from the perspective of the employer. He or she is going to be the one reading the resume and picking the ones that work for the company. What are they going to want to see?

If you’ve never written a resume before, the best way to get started is to just start listing everything you can think of that may or may not be helpful for getting jobs. Don’t bother trying to organize or format it, just get a great big list of stuff you’ve done or achieved. Once you can’t possibly think of anything else, start organizing what you have into different categories, feel free to just copy and paste into our sample resume or any other template. Your first resume will always be the hardest one to write, it’s just like anything else.

As we’ve discussed already, we’d recommend six main categories: Objective, Education, Work Experience, Skills, Activities and Honors, and References. Here, I’m going to go through these categories and describe what type of content you typically want to include.

Objective

Here, you want to state the purpose or goal of the resume. The example in the Sample Resume is: “To obtain a co-op or internship in electrical engineering for Summer, 2008.” Be as specific as you can, without excluding any position. Keep in mind that your objective is pretty much the “thesis statement” of the resume. You want to convince the employer that you want what they have, but give them idea of where you see yourself contributing in the company. The objective in the Sample Resume is a great example because it tells the employer you’re looking for a position over the summer in the field of electrical engineering, so they know when and what to consider for you.

Education

It is important to include your academic history and this is the section for it. Since you are looking at internships and entry level positions, most of your experience and merit comes from school. The sample resume does a good job outlining the important aspects of your school career. You want to make sure that you have your institution, major, GPA (even if it isn’t so great, they’re just going to ask anyway), related courses, and expected date of graduation. You are free to include more information like: credits, location, educational summer programs or courses, etc. As you progress there are some things you may want to take out, like if you are a psychology major in 400 level psychology classes, your introductory 100 class loses merit. You can use that space for other more impressive parts of your resume.

Work Experience

This can be substantial or not so important depending on your past. Ideally it’s great to have a full list of prior positions, but realistically that doesn’t always happen. What’s important is that whatever you have done should be put here. Even if you worked at a supermarket, your experience can be very relevant. Companies like to see your prior work experience to know the skills you have, but also to know that you are capable of working in a professional environment. Being a cashier at a supermarket means that you were able to interact with customers to ensure satisfaction, keep shelves stocked and tidy as demanded, and train incoming employees with the proper policies. You most likely won’t want to list everything you did, try to ensure that whatever experience listed is relevant to future positions. The common organization seen on resumes includes the company name followed by the position title followed by the tasks and responsibilities. Your responsibilities should be short and to the point in a bulleted format. You want each to start with a past tense descriptive action verb. You can find a list of these here. As noted before it is very important to include the time frame that you worked the position. If you take a summer off to travel, include it here! Companies like to see that you have kept busy, and you can still gain great experiences traveling that will help you with future positions.

Skills

As previously noted this varies heavily depending on the field. In highly technical fields, skills are important and you should be careful to outline specifically what skills you have. As a computer science major you want to outline what programming languages and software you know how to use. If your field doesn’t have many skills associated with it, you can include any skills that may help you get the job done. For example, if you’re in the medical field you might not have learned in your classes how to use computers, but putting the software you have experience with will make you look better than your competitors. Generally skills are added in a bulleted or comma separated list.

Activities and Honors

This category has already been outlined within our previous article. You want to include anything that you have done outside of school that shows traits desirable within a company. A great example would be captain of the soccer team because it shows leadership capabilities. You don’t want to include anything that is irrelevant from the position you applying because companies are only interested in how you will work out as an employee.

References

Again, you can simply leave “Available upon request.” The only time you would want to change this is if your references are really strong and will drastically help you with getting the position. Don’t worry if you don’t have strong references, most students don’t.

Resumes really shouldn’t be hard or scary, but they will require some time to become polished. This resume series is here to give you a kick start into the world of resume writing. You may have done amazing projects and performed impeccably in school, but without reflecting it well on your resume companies will not be interested.

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