Your Résumé
A résumé is a written picture of who you are—it’s a marketing tool, a selling tool, and a promotion of you as an ideal candidate for any job you may be interested in. Résumés and cover letters work together to represent you in the brightest light to prospective employers. With a well-composed résumé and cover letter, you stand out—which may get you an interview and then a good shot at landing a job.
In this section, we’ll start with the résumé as a key component of your career development tool kit. We’ll explore some of the many ways you can design and develop one for the greatest impact in your job search.
Purpose and Contents
Your résumé (sometimes spelled resumé or resume) is a written inventory of your education, work experience, job-related skills, accomplishments, volunteer history, internships, residencies, and more. It’s a professional autobiography in outline form to give the person who reads it a quick, general idea of who you are. With a better idea of who you are, prospective employers can see how well you might contribute to their workplace.
As a college student or recent graduate, though, you may be unsure about what to put in your résumé, especially if you don’t have much employment history. Still, employers don’t expect recent grads to have significant work experience. And even with little work experience, you may still have a host of worthy accomplishments to include. It’s all in how you present yourself.
Résumé Tips
You can view the transcript for “How to Write a Resume – LA Rams Employee” here (opens in new window).
You can view the transcript for “Recruiter Advice: Resumes” here (opens in new window).
You can view the transcript for “COMPETITIVE RESUME TIPS That Got Me Internships at GOOGLE, NBC and ELLE Magazine” here (opens in new window).