Resume and Self-Assessment

Now that you have identified a ‘dream job’ you would like to do after graduating and researched the company and the industry, the next step is to put together a resume and self-assessment.

Resume. A resume is not just a list of your qualifications and past experience. It can also be a powerful tool to assess your current position on your career path. Putting together a resume gives you a nice sense of accomplishment, but at the same time it also reveals areas where more work is required. For instance, you may see that your ‘dream job’ calls for some interpersonal skills that you may have but cannot document effectively, and give you an opportunity to remedy this. Since you have time to prepare for your ‘dream job,’ putting together your resume now will give you a chance to work on problem areas ahead of when you hit the job market.

Here are a few tips on building a good resume.

• First of all, use all available resources. The Business Reference Collection in the Paterno Library has an excellent collection of books that give you guidance on resume writing. A quick search on the CAT with ‘employment resumes’ will bring up dozens of books.
• Make sure that you present basic information: contact addresses are a must, as well as expected date of graduation or when you will be available to join work.
• It is good to have creative resume design, but more important to convey all the necessary information in a format that does not look too cluttered or untidy.
• Be absolutely accurate. Employers check resumes very carefully, and even a minor mistake can convey the impression that you are a careless person, or worse that you have falsified information. You may not have done this intentionally, but wrong information on a resume can kill an application.
• Finally, a word about composition. This is an aspect of resume-writing that is often overlooked. Proofread well to ensure that you make no spelling or grammatical errors. Use active words and avoid long and sloppy sentences. A good resume guide will list many more tips for you.

Self-assessment. Along with the resume, please turn in a two to three-page self-assessment. Successful managers are those who have a realistic appreciation of their own strengths and weaknesses, and the wisdom to choose career paths which utilize their inherent abilities to the maximum. The choice of careers therefore needs to begin with a clear-eyed inventory of your own strengths ans weaknesses. There are many resources, online and offline, to help you in this task. For example, check out an online version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator psychological test to find out your personality profile. While not fully scientific, this is still an amusing and insightful exercise.

For the purpose of the assignment, however, I am most interested in answers to the following questions. Please write up the answers as a brief paper, two to three pages long, that discusses your strengths and weaknesses in relation to the requirements of your ‘dream job.’

• What are the requirements, in terms of skills, training or prior experience, for your ‘dream job’? You may want to use the published job advertisement to identify these requirements. What is the employer is looking for?
• Where do you stand currently, in terms of the skills and talents your ‘dream job’ requires? What are your strengths, which make you a good candidate for this job? What are your weaknesses, which may keep you from getting selected for it?
• How may you build on your strenghts and remedy/compensate for your weaknesses in the time available to you before you enter the job market? Be as specific as you can here, because it will help you more to think and plan ahead.

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