How do I make a resume?

Or, where are some good places to find out how to make one?

I’m a college junior, and I’ve never made a real resume before. I need to subit a resume so I can be considered for some internships this summer. I have a general idea about what a resume should be, but I’m having trouble actually making one. By the way, I’m an MIS major, so that’s the type of jobs I’ll be applying for.

How do I decide what to put on there, and what to leave off? I don’t know how to list or explain my qualifications, or what qualifications to even put on there. I don’t know which of my prior jobs to list, since most of them really have nothing to do with my field (I doubt an employer would be impressed by my 2 years at Dairy Queen, right). About all I know how to do for sure is put my name/address/email on there. After that it isn’t really going well for me.

Can anyone help me? Where are some good places to find some examples of people’s resumes? Could I use the wizard on MS Word, or would that be frowned upon?

Thanks,
Blunt

Here’s my advice - go to the library or a bookstore and you will find lots of books about how to write a resume. I’ve seen one that’s nothing but examples of resumes for different professions. Some focus on the person’s education, some on experience, and others on personality traits, depending on what one needs to play up and what weaknesses one wants to hide. If the don’t help, you might want to go see a career counselor.

WordPerfect and Word have templates to help you make the resume LOOK good, and you can also get computer programs for this. This is really more IMHO than GQ, so I’m gonna move it over there now. - Jill

It’s a bit tricky since you have no relevant work experience, but I recommend the “functional resume” for the MIS field and the “chronological resume” for most others.

A functional resume focuses on your skills with specific languages, applications, operating systems, etc.

Example:

Languages: C++ (MS and Borland), Visual Basic 6.0, Java 2, COBOL (ugh).

Applications: MS Office, Photoshop, Freecell.

Operating Systems: Windows NT, Linux, Solaris, Macintosh.

Databases: DB2, Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase System 12.

Other technologies: COM, CORBA, DCOM, TAPI, MAPI.

This section is usually prefaced with an objective and followed by a brief chronology of your positions, then the educational section.

You shouldn’t exaggerate your knowledge, many IS resumes are scanned straight into a database and then searched for the relevant technology. If you don’t know C++, you don’t want to try and fake it.

As you are coming straight out of school, no one expects you to have worked for years in these areas. If you were a good employee while flipping burgers, waiting tables, mowing yards, etc., put them in the chronological section. It will give them an idea of the type of worker to expect.

You might get a lot of “you don’t have enough experience” responses. Dont fret, just keep looking. Once you have 2 years under your belt, those same companies will be drooling all over you (I have 20 years and it’s a blast to look for a job).

So, did you leave the (ugh) on your resume? :wink:

DMC is right, you should definitely go with a functional resume that highlights your skills, education, and whatnot, as opposed to experience. I’d like to add another suggestion as well. Add an objective to your resume. Basically this outlines the kind of work you are looking for and what you offer to make you successful in this position. When I came out of school, I used the following at the top of mine:

Yeah, I laid it on thick, but it worked :smiley:

There are tonnes of tips I could give you, the most important being that no matter what format you choose, use active verbs in the past tense, use point form instead of long paragraphs, and keep it short and to-the-point. If it can get the point across in a cursory thirty-second scan, then it’s a successful resume.

Nope, didn’t need to. I don’t even put COBOL on my resume, for fear that someone might actually offer to have me use it on a daily basis.

And there is nothing wrong with laying it on thick in the objective, that’s the only place to do so (besides the cover letter, of course). I’ve found that most objectives are anything but, they are instead subjective. :slight_smile:

Brevity is your friend…trust me on this.

As one that has written many resumes of my own and for friends and as one that has pushed aside resumes as a job qualifier in my past, brevity.

Sorry Donnie, that is too long of an objective.

A simple statement like:

is the best route to take from my experience. What ever the job calls for (don’t make 100 copies of the same resume and send them out, make them specific to the job at hand…)

Resumes don’t get the interview, it’s the cover letter.

IMO a one page resume should suffice, enough to give experience and/or education. Not too wordy, not too blah. Also, don’t “over extend” your job titles and jobs, make them important sounding but don’t use too many flowery words.

In short (ha me short in words?) do check out books from the library on resumes but find one that also gives you information on cover letters. You have to appeal to the person that originally will read them, then the next and the next…

BTW, I need to clarify a couple of things.

People who have to read twenty, fifty to 1000 resumes need clear and concise resumes…wordy resumes only aid them to throw them in the dreaded “File 13”.

Key words, a simple objective and strong points of experience are most important.

When it comes to a cover letter, there are so many routes to take, it’s difficult to pin down. Again brevity is your friend but play yourself up here, not in a resume. This is where you can pull on your strong points with regards to your resume.

For example:

“The last company I contracted with I did quite a bit of Perl programming which helped launch a new message board project called FreakBoard which had gone to $100,000,000 in sales in less than six months. My “x” programming was what helped along the process.”

Obviously a poor example but you can get the idea from that. Your resume is a statement of your qualifications, your cover letter is an honest “plea” to why you are right for the job along with telling them you are the asset their company needs.

You think You’ve got a challenge? I did a resume for a guy who’d been locked up for the prior 15 years.

I’m actually not a fan at all of objectives (either reading them or writing them). My take on it from the reading them perspective - I ignore all of the self described platitudes (who describes themselves as a slow learner or lazy worker?), and look to see only if it has anything remotely connected with the position that I’m offering. IOW - I more often use it against the person than for them. They’re often either really generalized or too specific. and, bottom line is that here you are introducing yourself and the first thing you want me to know is what you want. But if you’re really sold on the idea of one, go brief. (Note, I’m not claiming that the poster above was wrong in their assesment of how well theirs worked, just that my experience is different).

I’m a big fan of the functional type for most persons - they allow the reader to skip over stuff that’s irrelevant to them (If I’m looking for a computer programmer, I won’t care about your experience in the restaurant industry).

I don’t care about hobbies and interests unless there’s link to the job.

I agree w/techchick about the cover letter. My formula for a cover letter is:

Paragraph 1 = 'please accept the enclosed resume as application for the (blank) position as (advertised or posted or however you discovered it). As you will see (link something about your resume to the specific job you are applying for).

Paragraph 2 = Link things that aren’t readily apparent from your resume to the job. For example: "during my tenure with (job) (or ‘in my such and such class’), I was responsible for blah blah blah (some specific neato thing you did that got praise) or shows some specific employability skill (the ability to work under pressure - “while employed at the call center, it wasn’t unusual for me to process 100 calls per shift” or whatever). You should have a couple of things that you want to highlight. Either specific knowledge, talent or ‘quick learner’ type of characteristic (by the way, as an interviewer, I’m more likely to be impressed by an example of you being reliable, a quick learner, etc. than by your statements that you are).

Paragraph 3 = "thank you for your time and consideration. I would be happy to meet with you at your conveninece to further discuss the position. I can be reached at (repeat all contact info).

Good luck.

This may not be true for all fields, but the trend nowadays is to keep the resume’ to one page. As has been said before, the person reviewing the resumes’ is probably looking at a large quantity of them, and he or she is more likely to dismiss a wordy resume’. Keep it short and sweet. If you do put down any work experiences (and I suspect any potential employers would want to know what you’d been up to since graduating high school), for whatever jobs you include you should list the responsibilities/duties you had that are relevant to the position you’re seeking. For example - pulling this out of my ass - if you worked at DQ for a few years and are looking to get into, hypothetically, management, you could say that you were responsible for time management, customer relations, inventory procurement, and marketing. See? It’s all in how you spin it.

Thanks for the tips everyone, it has really helped a lot. I’ll be going to the library today, so hopefully I can get this thing done either tomorrow, or at least by Monday.

One thing that I can see from this thread, is that I don’t have all the skills that maybe some employers would expect. I kind of knew that because I just made it in qualifying for an internship at my school (if I had taken 1 less class I wouldn’t qualify). My toughest challenge in making this resume may be trying to make it sound like I would be worthwile to hire, without overexagerating anything.

Another quick question:

How much will my GPA affect me in getting an internship? I know there are some that I don’t even qualify for because of GPA already. Basically my GPA after this semester will only be about 2.3 - 2.4, but I do have reasonable explanations for that. Will employers even give me the time of day with a low GPA?

Remember, you are not required to put things on your resume, just because some book tells you to. If you GPA isn’t all that great, put where you went, but don’t list your GPA. (Be consistent though, if you went to two schools, don’t list the GPA for one, but omit it on the next)

One page is definitely the goal. The only exception to the one page rule is when your experince (past job history) takes it to a second page.

Do list all past employment, whether relative or not, just don’t dwell on it. At your age, no one should be raising an eyebrow about blocks of time that appear to be skipped on your resume, but the fact that you have been working, and have held down jobs for X period of time are good qualifying factors, just as much as the education you’ve received. Once my resume started pushing past a page is when i started dropping off my eariest jobs.

-Doug

My WAG is that it does matter a little bit; but there’s no reason I can think of to actually advertise your GPA. I remember being a hiring dude not long ago, and I saw a few resumes that included the person’s GPA - in college. Ten years hence. And some were in the low 3’s and below. I mean, nothing against anyone with that kind of GPA - and Lord knows, I was one - but there’s no need to tell people you were a C or low-B student. Recruiters are more interested in the kind of courses you took in high school than in the GPA itself (and if they really, really wanna know, they would ask for your transcript). Since you’re in college, recruiters would want to know your major, what other courses you took outside your major, maybe your SAT scores, but they don’t need to know your GPA, and you don’t need to offer it - unless, of course, it’s something like a 3.75 and higher. Then you wanna brag about it.

Speaking as somebody who just got done interviewing for summer internships (yes, we’re done already, you may be running a bit late), here’s what I looked for in a resume:

GPA–if it’s there, it should be good. If it’s not, I know it’s probably not good. But I had a horrible GPA, too, so I’ll just ask you what and why it is if you make it to interview. I also put more stock on GPA in your Major than GPA in classes that won’t help you do anything but graduate. And make any excuse about a low GPA well-rehearsed and short.

Experience: I want to know if you’ve had a technical job before first. If you haven’t, I want to know if you’ve had any kind of job. If you haven’t, well, strike one, because there are some things that any work experience teaches you (even if it’s “You have to show up on time and can’t leave when you get bored”). But don’t put more than 1 or two jobs in areas outside your specialty on a resume.

COURSEWORK: If you have no technical experience, than here is where you get to tell me what kind of stuff you know. Don’t just say JAVA/C/C++ when you really mean “I’ve taken Data Structures and networking courses in C++, Intro to Java, and I bet I could understand C if I had to.” Unless the average interviewer is worse than me, they will catch you if you say that you know something that they want you to know, but you really don’t know it. At the same time, don’t put down something that you really do know but have no interest working on (COBOL, FORTRAN,etc, were also NOT on my resume).

Just my 2 cents…

LordVor