Interim or Temporary Resume
Putting together a good resume takes time. Give yourself the time you need to do it right. In the interim, put together a temporary resume to use until your good ones are ready.
At the top of a single page, place your name, then your address and telephone number. List your education next (most recent first), and military service, if you were in the military. Follow that with your business affiliations (most recent first). List the employer you worked for, your job title and a brief explanation (a short paragraph) of what you did for that employer. Include a short personal section that mostly says you'll "travel and relocate." You should be able to get this on a page to a page and a half. Take the time to make the resume look good, even though you'll be using it for only a short time. Be sure you have no misspelled words or typographical errors. Print the resume out on good paper-even this summary resume has to reflect class. Your resume is not a place to economize.
Achievement Resume
Learning to write achievement statements that legitimately tell your story is the hardest part of writing resumes. You learned how to do that in the last chapter, so the rest of writing an achievement resume should be a snap.
Begin by typing your name, address, and telephone numbers. If you don't have an office or an answering service, don't include a business number. Give an alternate number-say that of a friend who's generally available-where the telephone will be answered. If you are using a word processor and a printer with fancy type fonts, Times Roman Bold is a nice font for your name and address. Use bold type on your resume only on the headings-and your name is your most important heading.
Next, write your job title as a heading, then place your thumbnail sketch, in indented paragraph form, under the heading. The job title should be in bold print, the thumbnail sketch should be the plain font.
Your next heading should read Selected Achievements. Under that heading, choose five to eight of your significant achievements. These must illustrate the accomplishments you've made in jobs that relate to the job title you've used to head the thumbnail sketch. Put the best achievement first, the next-best second, the third-best last, and spread the others out in between. If you keep a file of achievement statements, either on paper on in a word processing file, you can prepare a number of slightly different Achievement Resumes with achievements specifically tailored to a job title or industry.
Follow the selected achievements with an Education section, follow that by the Business Affiliations section, then any of the optional sections which you feel should be included. Place the personal section last or omit it altogether. In an Achievement Resume, you are trying for a one-page "flyer" that titillates the reader, leaving him or her to know more. You really have to hone your statements to get rid of unnecessary words and include only the essentials.
Even after you have finished an Achievement Resume you can stomach, continue to rework and polish your achievement statements.
No resume has ever been written that couldn't be improved by a little judicious editing. You will find that you think of better ways to express your achievements as you go along.
Chronological Resume
The Chronological Resume begins exactly like the Achievement Resume. You list your name, address and telephone numbers, then the job title and thumbnail sketch follow.
Your next heading can be Background and Experience, Business Affiliations, Experience, Relevant Experience, Employment History or Business Record. For each position you've held, give your job title, your employer, and some identifier about the employers' business, if you feel that it's necessary. Then fill in the duties, responsibilities and functions statements for the position that you wrote earlier.
The next section should list your education, followed by any of the other resume sections you think would be helpful. You may want to include some narrative in an honors or patents section, and you may increase the amount of information in the business and community organizations and personal section. You may want to detail your military service. You write a Chronological Resume for people who are concerned with detail, and you should supply that detail without becoming verbose.
Functional Resume
When you're applying for a position that incorporates several different functions and you've had experience in each and possibly in other related areas, the Functional Resume is called for. You can write the statements you plan to include in the achievement format. Or you can use the duties and responsibilities function-statements if they're more illustrative of your competencies.
This resume also begins as do the Achievement and Chronological ones. You list your name, address, telephone numbers, the job title you're looking for and the thumbnail sketch.
The next heading you'd list as Selected Achievements, Related Experience or simply Experience, Then you place subheadings, such as ''Management", "Planning", "Manufacturing" and "Technical." After each subheading, you list the achievement or duties, and responsibilities functional statements that are illustrative of the subheading.
The rest of the resume is completed much as are the other resumes: the education section, a business affiliation sections (just a listing of employers you worked for and your job titles) and then add any of the other sections you think are needed to best carry your message.
