Welcome to module two. Before we go any further in this module to learn about how to create your resumé and how to start to think about the experiences you want to include, it's important to talk about the different types of resumés available to you. If you've done any searching online, or you've looked at resumé books or samples, you've probably seen a variety of types of resumés. Those could include chronological, functional, combined. You've probably even seen CV next to some job applications. I'll start with CV. CV is a much different document then a resume entirely. A CV is typically a loaner document and it's something that's mostly going to be used only in areas of research or academia. A functional resume is a resume that focuses more on your skills and a little bit less on the work experience. In a chronological resume, it tends to focus most heavily on the work experience. Most of the people enrolled in this course as young professionals or college students, you're probably thinking about more of a combination resume and that's one of the more common types of resumes today. So that's the type of resume that we're going to build together in this course. So let's start to make our resume. The very first thing that you need to do is just start writing your resume, and there's a saying that says, the hardest part about writing a resume is just starting to write it but don't worry too much about your format or don't worry to much about the specifics. Just start writing down all of the experiences you can think of. Start thinking about times when you've volunteered somewhere. Places that you might have observed something. Indicate places that you've worked in the past, skills you've developed. Think about student clubs that you've been in, any leadership positions you've held. Include your education here as well. Your education is a big part of your resume, and just start to get all of those things down. Jot down the dates where you can remember them, but at this point don't worry too much about your formatting or your consistency. We're going to polish all that up later in the course. Right now we just kind of want to get a free association exercise down where you're just jotting things down as they come to your mind. So now that you have all these experiences down on the page, it's time to start thinking about the way in which you want to organize them, so we're going to start talking about types of headings that you would find on a resume. This is a challenge for new resume writers, because it's sometimes tough to think about getting outside of the box of just education, and work experience, and that's it. There's actually a whole lot of other options available to you for your resume. This is a great way to see an example of a time when you might find a way to include a really fun student club that you were in or maybe a really rewarding volunteer experience. But you might realize that they're not always related to one job you applied to, but they could be great assets on a different resume. So this is going back to where we said resume is a living document, this is how we would be changing things depending on the type of job that we're applying to. So let's look at the sections that form a general resume of a college student or a recent graduate. This sample is just one way to format your document. We have an entire module devoted to the format of your document in module four. So before we go top to bottom looking at these sections, let's consider the sections that are clearly identified because the are unique. In this sample, all the section headings are in caps and bolded. That makes them stand out from the rest of the resume. Making your headings prominent but not distracting is a very important part of building your resume. On the sample, you can see it begins with the contact information at the top of the page, followed by an objective statement. Objective statements are optional, and might also be called things like professional summary, or maybe summary of skills, or even summary of qualifications. None of these sections are required, but in order for them to be worth the space on your resume, it needs to be targeted towards the position. Industry and ideally the company in which you are applying. We will talk a little bit more about the objective statement later in module four. After the objective, we have the education section. It is very common to have your education as the highest section on your page. For most of you, education is likely a very important part of where you are in your life and career and it will likely fit very well at the top of your resume. You will want to format your school name exactly as it will appear on your degree. Feel free to include your GPA, as long as you feel comfortable with it. There's no law that says you have to include your GPA, but the general rule of thumb we use, is if it's over a 3.0, on a 4.0 scale, go ahead and put it on. This rule varies based on the type of degree, and also the grading scale. In this example, relevant course work has been included within the education section. You can do that, or sometimes you can make relevant course work its own section or choose not to include course work at all in your resume. Sometimes you might also see academic honors and awards included in this section as well. Scanning down the rest of the resume, you can see other headings such as skills. Projects, internships, related experience, leadership activities, honors and awards, these are just some examples for this particular resume. An academic project section might make sense for an engineering student who might have created actual things in projects, but for a philosophy student maybe there is a more enhanced leadership section or a stronger role from a student club. This is an example of how one resume doesn't necessarily fit all. You may or may not have information's from these sections on your resume. Other headings we frequently see on resumes could include things like certifications, languages, professional affiliations, volunteer experience, study abroad, campus involvement and more. Before we wrap up with this module, I would like to touch on the idea of transferable skills. Transferable skills is a word many of you have probably heard before but you might not know the exact meaning of it. Essentially, it just indicates a skill that you might have started to develop at a certain job or work experience, and that you could certainly apply in a different work experience as well. Employers really like to see your transferable skills highlighted on your resume. So think about things like communication or leadership or advocacy. Things that you've done in one place that you could do in another very easily. So transferable skills are something that most of you have already developed in some sort of a work experience, or some sort of classroom project so we're going to talk more in module three about how to really get the most out of those transferable skills and get them on our document. As we start to outline our content so that employers can really quickly and easily identify how the skills we've already developed can help them at their company.
