Learn the fundamentals of resume writing for improving your odds of success

So back in the college days when we had all just entered our third year and preparing for the internship people were judged by their resumes. No kidding, we would just try to look at each other resumes for content, format and ideas. Seeing other peoples resume made us feel a range of emotions from jealousy to admiration.

Many people hadn’t done a lot but they presented it so well that they got shortlisted for the best of the companies on day 1 while many super talented ones didn’t make it.

What was the reason? The reason was their resumes.

Okay okay, hang on! Can you explain what is a resume? Are you referring to CV?

Well, let me explain to you.

What is a resume?

Colloquially resume and Curriculum Vitae (CV) are used interchangeably. But they are not the same. Let’s learn their meaning and differences

Curriculum Vitae (CV): Curriculum Vitae is a Latin phrase translated roughly to mean “The course of your life”. The phrase is used to refer to a document that describes your professional journey so far in great detail. There is no page limit for a CV. CV describes your education, professional achievements, collaborations, work experience, skills, languages, certifications, courses, research papers, publications, in great detail. It contains your personal information like communication address, age etc.

Resume: A resume is a simpler and smaller document that is crafted specifically for a job. Suppose you have a computer science background and during college, you did different types of projects in different fields like agriculture, linguistics, and financial management. So, while applying for a position in the finance field you would not like to include your experience with the agriculture and linguistics department. You only mention the relevant part for the job requirement. A resume is crisp, specific, to the point and hence generally it is a shorter document with one or two pages.

While a CV can go up to eight pages for an experienced person but even if you have two decades of experience for a particular role your resume should not go beyond two pages.

Role of resume writing

Resume writing is an instrumental skill to acquire for ensuring success in professional life. No matter how talented you’re, if your resume doesn’t reflect that you deserve a chance to prove yourself in subsequent rounds, it would be very hard for you to tread in professional life. A well-crafted resume is your ticket to the next round and then you can ace the process with your knowledge, skills and personality. But a resume is what gets you that opportunity.

1. So for applying for a particular position you have to make a resume not a CV and to be honest back in college, we used to make three-four different resumes for different types of companies.
2. Even if you’re applying for a fellowship, competition, startup fund, some other training program then also instead of sending a long CV which no one would be interested to dig in is better to send a crisp resume with relevant content.

Back in the college days, I saw many people had one resume for coding jobs, one for finance-related jobs, one for operations related jobs, one for data science-related profiles etc.

Some people had five different types of resumes for five different types of job opportunities.

Yeah yeah!! I get that, resume writing is important. But how to create my resume?

Don’t worry we will tell you that too.

How to craft a well-defined resume?

Before drafting your resume you first need to decide two things:

1. Why are you making this resume? Whether it is the generic resume or it is for any specific position or program. You need to have the objective very clearly in mind.
2. Who are you making it for? Are you making it for a professor, for an NGO, for an MNC or a program?

Once you are clear in your head why are you making this resume and who you’re making it for then the time it is to decide:

1. Content of the resume
2. And organising the format of the resume

One way to start making a resume is to first make a detailed CV with everything (Biodata, education, work experience, research exposure, publications, certifications, courses, languages known etc)in it and then pick the content that is relevant for your resume in this case.

Resume format

There are hundreds of websites out there that can help you with the format. There are some standard resume formats like CHRONOLOGICAL, FUNCTIONAL, HYBRID etc. You can choose one as per your need. But ideally, a resume must contain the following items:

1. Personal information: Generally on top, it is advised to mention your personal details like name, communication address, email id, phone number etc.
2. Objective: You need to mention the objective of your resume clearly especially if you’re not applying through a program or channel that makes it obvious. But be careful, do not write an over-complicated objective with super difficult words from GRE Vocabulary. It becomes impossible to even decipher the objective without using Google 10 times. No one will take that much pain for you. So be very specific and clear about your objective. Use specific job titles and phrases to describe you and your objective.
3. Professional Summary: Describe your professional life briefly with important keywords so that the employer or the reviewer would be interested to find out more in case your profile is fit for the role.
4. Education: Include your educational qualification with marks, area of study, years of attendance and the institution name etc.
5. Work experience: Include the relevant work experience. Suppose you’re applying for the role of Digital marketing manager then include your work experience related to marketing. Because the company might not be interested in your data science work experience.
6. Skills: You should add relevant technical and non-technical skills as well. For example, in case you’re applying for digital marketing knowing, Canva, Coschedule, Google Analytics, SEO would be helpful.
7. Extras: If there is enough place you should include your exposure and participation in extracurricular activities because it shows how diversified and creative you’re as a person which is always helpful. You can also include some of the relevant certifications, courses and workshops if any.

Expert guidance

Although, you can make a perfectly awesome resume on your own in some cases having expert guidance might be helpful. Especially if the stakes are very high and you just can’t afford to have any mistakes.

Platforms for drafting resumes & expert advice

There are thousands of resume writing services firms and websites out there that you can take help of. Experts can help you with:

1. content,
2. formatting,
3. language, and
4. structure of your resume.

Scholarbees for resume writing

But the issue is that most resume writing services or experts charge a hefty amount. Also, you will not be able to learn a lot to do it on your own the next time.

This is where Scholarbees comes into the picture. It is an online one on one learning platform through which you can book live courses or private sessions from experts on a particular topic.

1. Through Scholarbees you can schedule a session with experts for taking help with resume writing at affordable prices.
2. We are also conducting free webinars every week. You just have to register on the link. Through these webinars, you would learn a lot about building the right resume for a specific objective.

Hope this helps you in making an ace resume for yourself that gets you attention and opportunities.