Strong Descriptions In Resume Writing

Skills-Based Resume Building For some high schoolers, they have spent time building a resume, with job experience, extracurriculars, leadership opportunities, and organizations. If that isn’t you, we need to talk about skills-based resume building.

Verbage For each of the job experience, education, skills, and leadership sections, you can use skills-based descriptions to help add heft to your limited experience. Does that mean you can’t work on adding more experience in the coming year? Of course not. However, there is still hope if you can learn this simple skill for resume writing.

Example for research If I was applying for a job as a research assistant for a company, I might want to say I learned and mastered research skills through my education. I might put: 2011-2015 Mansfield High School, Mansfield, TX 76063 Research skills Identified inquiry questions for areas of growth or lack of background knowledge Evaluated validity of sources and cited them using scholarly citation Investigated multiple perspectives for complex issues Extracted information from multiple sources that best supported perspectives Knowledge of MLA, Chicago, and APA citation styles and formatting Ability to navigate databased to access sources, and to review digital and print sources for data collection purposes

Example for people skills Okay, so your turn. Use the verbiage from the handout on the back of your resume draft, and think about how you could describe your development of people skills through your high school education, or through organizations or jobs you have possessed. I will give you five minutes, and then we will share out some of these.

Now try problem solving skills… Remember, we talked about analytical skills (problem solving step-by-step based on logic) and out of the box thinking (with a creative twist when analytical skills fail). Consider how you have used either or both of these.

Now, you’re on your own Open up the template from my website, or if you already have a resume saved on your Microsoft Office account or Google Drive, open it up and revise it. Make changes, updating and adding those descriptions. Use the verbiage sheet on the back of your resume draft for help in identifying skills you could discuss. CHANGE THE TENSE: computed to “able to compute statistics…etc”