For most people, their road to professional activity starts with writing a resume, which is in itself a kind of art, for not everyone is capable of cleverly pointing out his or her positive traits and making negative ones look unimportant or even beneficial. Samples of good resumes may be easily found online, but reading and perusing them isn’t enough to write anything worthy on your own.
You should take into account a number of rules that are most likely to help you:
- Be definite and matter-of-fact, base your words on facts and, better still, on figures.
- Avoid vagueness; describe your particular achievements at the previous jobs and benefits you brought to your employers.
- Every online set of resume-writing tips, however different they may be, will tell you one and the same thing: zero familiarity, maximum formality.
- Try not to use contractions, colloquial turns of speech and words and, above all, never use slang or jargon. Don’t think that the potential employer will be impressed with you presenting samples of jargon pertaining to the job in question. He will most likely be annoyed instead.
- Think logically and try to imagine what kinds of work the employer is likely to need in future. Job description may give you good samples of it, but you still can think about something on your own judging from the overall trends in this company, economic conditions and so on.
- Make your resume as concise and as easy-to-read as possible. The employer won’t spend much time reading it, so you should make sure that even if he just glances at it, he will catch all the necessary information.
- No long paragraphs, wide spaces between lines, indentations – all this helps in organizing the text and making it easy and pleasant to read and perceive.