The Organization: For each employer, write the full name of the company (spelled correctly) and the city and state where it is located.
Title: Write your job title. If your job title is difficult to understand or if it doesn't mean anything by itself, change it!
- Change "Sales Associate" to "Senior Retail Sales Clerk, Men's Clothing Department," if that is appropriate.
- Change "Secretary" to "Office Manager," if that description is more accurate.
Length of Employment: Give the month and year you began, and the month and year that you left. If you are still employed there, write "present" in the appropriate place.
Results and Accomplishments: Write short statements of specific results and accomplishments you had on this job.
Use Action Words
Begin each statement with an action verb. Use words or ideas from the "Action Words" list that follows to make sure you begin each phrase with an action word.
Omit these three words from your writings: "I," "me," and "my." Then omit three more: "a," "an," and "the." These are "extra" words, and they are not particularly appropriate for resume style writing. Your phrases will be cleaner, shorter, and easier to understand if you omit these words.
Describe each accomplishment separately. If you think about it, you may be able to separate one project into several smaller skills or accomplishments. This can give you shorter (and more powerful) statements, rather than a description of one big project.
Keep each accomplishment short, so that it can be read quickly by the reader!
Use numbers whenever you can exact numbers or percentages are powerful.
And if you had several jobs or accomplishments that sound the same, do not repeat the same thing for each job or department in which you worked. This should be obvious, but I have seen it hundreds of times!
Here are some examples of "good" statements:
- Wrote 300+ programs for IBM main frame computer system
- Received seven letters of commendation from sales executives for exceeding quotas.
- Increased sales 41 percent over prior year for same territory. Established 77 new accounts.
- Implemented new sales record system, saving 4 hours weekly for each sales representative, or total of 128 weekly hours, which were then available for sales calls.
- Managed sales force of 36 independent agents and 22 company sales representatives, covering seven fields and 29 territories.
- Reduced inventories 17 percent by developing and implementing new sales forecasting system
- Reformulated 13 cereal and snack products to conform to federal guidelines for shelf life improvement.
- Reformulated non dairy topping product for improved taste. Decreased cost of raw materials by $150,000 annually.
- Invented and patented new method of treating perishable food products. Reduced annual cost of formulation by more than $250,000 per year.
- Negotiated and sold injection molding division for parent company. Resulted in $3,000,000 profit; saved plant shutdown costs estimated at $170,000.
- Supervised 7 full time and 18 part time retail sales employees.
- Won 14 design awards for graphic design of three metals industry magazines published for nationwide distribution.
- Developed new typesetting system using MS DOS computer system when software was not available to meet company's needs.
- Won ADDY Award for excellence in creativity for full page newspaper advertisement. National award was won by only 3 people from 7,000 entries.
Use additional sheets of paper to describe your various jobs as needed, using the worksheet that follows.
After You Have Documented Your Work Experience
After you have completed a worksheet for each of your jobs, decide which one result or accomplishment was most important in each one. Which would look best to a future employer?
Rank that one #1. Choose the next most important. Rank it #2. And so on.
If you did the same things on each of your last several jobs, do this: For the jobs you held years ago, write shorter job/results/accomplishments paragraphs than you write for more recent jobs.
Reword the group of related accomplishments to sound slightly different, and use shorter statements. If some results (expressed in numbers, percentages) and increases are significant, be sure to include some of these in your statements.
Generally, the more recent your job, the more space it should receive on your resume. Jobs you held 10, or more, years ago are usually considerably less significant.
If these "older" jobs do not relate at all to the job you are now seeking, they deserve only a line or two. Mention them primarily to show where you were working and for how long.
You will see, when you finish writing each statement, that some are more important than others. And that some relate more directly to the work you want now.
This process will help you to begin thinking about which items to include in your final resume, and which ones to eliminate.
For most people, the work experience section of their resume is the most important. You are hired for the results you have had on your jobs, for your accomplishments, and for your ability to solve employer problems.
In the statements in this section, you are explaining why you will be a valuable employee. The reader is more likely to consider you favorably because of these statements than from anything else in your resume.
This is generally true unless you are relatively young.
For most young people, "meaningful work, related to what you want to do for a career" is difficult to find. So don't be discouraged if this section, for you, is filled with results and accomplishments from your after school grocery bagging experiences, your baby sitting jobs, and such.
These jobs still give employers an idea of your accomplishments, of the responsibilities you have been given, and of any promotions you have earned, and awards you have won.
