Your formal education (college and graduate school) offers your prospective employer an opportunity to determine your mental and leadership capacities early in your adult years. Many resumes I come across include only the job-seeker's college and degree. Even if you attended college years ago, it still pays to include your place in the class (top 10 percent, top third, etc.) or your grade-point average (3.5 out of 4). If neither of those is exceptional, include your grade-point average in your major. Even if you are only in the top half of your class, it might pay to include this fact. If you don't, your prospective boss could easily assume you were in the bottom half. If you completed college less than ten or fifteen years ago, include extracurricular activities that suggest you're well-rounded, and a leader among peers (for example: chairman, school newspaper; president, student organization). Unfortunately, some job-seekers get carried away when it comes to education and include far too much detail about their college experience. Temper your enthusiasm for including laundry lists of courses and organizations to which you belong. Include only those that best support your candidacy - those that suggest you were the sort of person the ideal candidate would have been in his early years. It stands to reason that the younger you are, the more important each activity or grade is. The older you are, the less space you need devote to your education.
Continuing Education
If you have taken courses since college (at your company's expense, perhaps, or independently) to help you in your chosen field, they should be included on your resume. Many company-sponsored courses-such as those given by Xerox, DuPont, General Electric, IBM-are known for their quality. If they are relevant to your job objective, a two-week intensive seminar or thirteen-week course could be more valuable in terms of your next assignment than your B.A. degree.
It could be a mistake to include this type of training in the formal education section of your resume however. Since this type of education occurs subsequent to college, and since each section of your resume is usually written in reverse chronological order, you could end up burying your college or graduate-school experience below an AMA seminar. If you utilize a separate "continuing education" section, however, and incorporate this section after your formal education section, you avoid this problem and put the two types of education into proper perspective.
Keep in mind, too, that several kinds of continuing-education courses could actually hurt you in your job search! The candidate who has completed a course in selling insurance or real estate usually gets himself in trouble when he includes these on his resume. Doing so suggests that he is an entrepreneur in his free time and might well be expected by his prospective employer to moonlight on the job. Few employers want this sort of person in a full-time position. They'd prefer the person who relaxes when he's not working at his full-time job, and who comes to work refreshed, not tuckered out from showing houses. There's another type of course that should be included in your "continuing education" section with caution: and that's "human relations." The excellent Dale Carnegie course is one such type of program. Several executive recruiters have pointed out that frequently candidates who take such courses have a human relations problem to begin with. If you do include such courses, be sure they are really very relevant to the job you're after. (The salesman, for example, may take such a course because it is routinely given to all sales people in his company.)
Professional Certifications, Awards, Publications
If you have enough information to relate, you may want to use a separate section for each of these general areas. If not, it's a good idea to group awards, certifications, and publications in this general category. Again, one caveat: make sure they are relevant. A real estate broker's license is nice to have, but questionable in a resume if your business career is that of a financial analyst. If the certification you have is extremely relevant to the position you're going after, this section belongs between your career experience and formal education, rather than following the latter. The accountant obviously should want his prospective employer to learn-as soon as possible after describing his business experience- that he secured his CPA certification. Why bury this fact after his undergraduate education?
Industry Associations
Many job-seekers include all the industry associations they belong to even though they have done nothing more than pay their annual membership dues. Belonging to the AMA means next to nothing to the prospective employer. Anyone can purchase an annual membership card. But if you've been active in your association, that's another story. If you've conducted seminars on behalf of your associations, by all means relate this experience. If you've been a member of any standing committee, an officer in your association, don't leave this off your resume! All of these activities may provide additional contacts or insights that your prospective employer may be interested in securing. But listing clubs and associations for which you do nothing more than write a dues check is pointless. You could better use the space to include another worth point.
