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The Anatomy of a Winning Resume

Are you ready to create a resume that highlights your strongest credentials and throws your competitors into the shade? Are you ready to make it clear to your potential employers that you know how to bring value to the position and help the company meet its goals? Great! But as you move forward, you’ll have to make your case in standardized way that employers find easy to read, scan, and remember. Include each of these elements and make such each one stands out clearly.

Summary

Start with a clear summary between three and five sentences long. Place this section at the top of the page, right under your contact information. Your summary should explain who you are and what you can do, but most of all, it should show employers how you intend to contribute to the success of the company.

Education

Under the summary, list each of your educational credentials including your college degrees, graduate degrees, licenses, and certifications. Include the name of each institution and your course of study there. If you’ve attended college, don’t include your high school. And if you graduated from college more than three years ago, don’t include your GPA.

Work History

Feel free to arrange your work history either chronologically (with your most recent position first), or by order of relevance to the open position. Just make sure each entry includes your employer, your job title, your dates of employment and a few bullet points outlining your most important accomplishments while you held each job. Make sure your listed accomplishments are unique, not just restatements of the basic requirements of the position. If possible, quantify your accomplishments, by adding numbers to projects you completed, the new products you developed, or the revenue you raised.

Skills

This should be the final section of your resume, but it’s by no means the least important. Use this section to explain your unique skills that don’t necessarily relate to the positions you’ve held. These may include the languages you speak, the software programing languages you’ve mastered, musical instruments you play, sports at which you excel, and your artistic accomplishments.

For more detail on how to create a resume that emphasizes your strongest skill sets and places you credentials in the spotlight, reach out to the NC staffing and job search experts at PSU.

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