Building a resume
A resume is a brief summary of your education, skills, and experiences. Employers will read it to understand quickly how you are prepared to fulfill job responsibilities.
A resume is a brief summary of your education, skills, and experiences. Employers will read it to understand quickly how you are prepared to fulfill job responsibilities.
This section should be placed at the top of your resume. It will provide the employer with your professional contact information. For example, provide your IU Indianapolis email address that includes your name instead of gocolts@gmail.com.
Ensure you include your:
This section provides a quick picture of your current educational pursuits. Now that you are in college, you won’t need to list your high school degree. You should include your:
This section uses action statements (see below) to highlight any experience that has helped you gain skills valuable to the position for which you are applying. This can include any of the following:
When listing experiences, include:
Final tip: List experiences that have ended using past tense and experiences still happening using present tense. Also, if an experience hasn’t ended, list “Present” in place of the end month and year.
In addition to the required sections, you may want to include some of the information below. Include optional sections only if you think it will showcase your particular skills or qualities as a potential employee.
If you decide to include this in your resume, keep it concise. This brief statement should summarize the type of work you want and a few skills you bring to a position.
The goal is to showcase your particular skills in the action statements you list with your experience. If you include this section, focus on technical, language, or professional skills that you have refined in some way. These might be skills you have acquired through academic coursework, trainings, special projects, or leadership roles.
You might include this section if you have completed relevant trainings or earned related certifications or licenses. For example, if applying as a research assistant, you might want to include if you have received Internal Review Board (IRB) training. If applying to a position in education, you might want to include if you have received a teaching license or first-aid training.
You can include this section to highlight involvement that will showcase your skills and interests related to the position, but are not in your experience section. If you had a particular role within the organization, you should include that with the organization. Your list of organizations might include some of the following:
You can include this section to showcase any particular achievements for which you have been recognized. When listing awards, be sure to note who presented the award and when.
Consider these strategies for formatting your resume.
Use action statements to describe your experiences. These will communicate what you did, how you did it, and why it was important.
What?Job Duty
Who?People
How?Skill
Why?Result
Example: Developed marketing materials using Adobe InDesign to promote the Office of Student Employment.
Research | Financial | Communicate | Helping | Management | Organizing |
Collected | Allocated | Addressed | Advocated | Administered | Approved |
Evaluated | Appraised | Marketed | Assisted | Delegated | Compiled |
Interviewed | Balanced | Discussed | Coached | Executed | Implemented |
Investigated | Estimated | Explained | Educated | Planned | Maintained |
Surveyed | Projected | Recruited | Referred | Produced | Scheduled |
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