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Prioritizing Job Descriptions in Your Resumé
The most difficult and time-consuming section of any resumé is the work experience listing. It doesn't matter what level you have reached in your professional career. If you have just graduated college and don't have any full-time professional experience, you wonder whether your part time jobs and summer internship are sufficient to get your foot in the door. If you are a seasoned professional with extensive work experience, you worry how to account for all that hard work on only one page. If you are changing careers, you agonize over which skills best showcase your qualifications for your new line of work. Listing work responsibilities on our resumés doesn't get easier as our careers progress. The key to making the process manageable is to focus upon your career objective and prioritize your work experience to showcase the qualifications most relevant to that objective.
When people are asked about their work responsibilities, they tend to focus upon routine activities and treat things that are done periodically or occasionally as an afterthought. This unconsidered response can be a costly mistake in listing your professional experiences on your resumé because it often ends up diminishing your most significant responsibilities, simply because they are listed after less important ones that are done more frequently.
To avoid falling into this trap, first put together a list of your responsibilities on a separate sheet of paper. For your initial draft, don't worry about how you are phrasing each statement. The most important thing is to get onto paper a list of everything that you do in your current or have done in your previous jobs.
Once your list is completed, consider all of the responsibilities you have included. What are the three most important items on the list for each job? How do those items relate to your career objective? Are there any other responsibilities you have listed that better support your career objective than the three you picked as the most critical to your job? You have to consider all these questions in order to prioritize the elements of your job descriptions on your resumé.
Begin each descriptive phrase with a power word, such as managed, developed, communicated, etc. Make sure that the statements you list first quantify your achievements -- don't be afraid to list sales figures, customer acquisition rates, budget and timeline successes, or any other hard numbers which give a concrete basis for your claims of success. Also, these statements should be harmonized with your career objective. If you want to get a job in project management, telling your employer that you managed a team of 20 people will effectively highlight your qualifications. It is important to quantify your job description statements on your resumé; however, don't go overboard and quantify everything, just one or two that are most critical to your job and are goal driven. This shows your employer that you think in terms of exceeding your goals. All subsequent descriptions of your responsibilities should reinforce the first one or two items on your list.
Prioritizing doesn't just apply to your job descriptions, although it is in this particular part of the resumé that job seekers most frequently fail to present themselves well. Achievements and qualifications are often communicated poorly because they are not ordered properly. Once again, you need to start by listing everything on scratch paper, then consider which of your achievements and your qualifications are most complimentary to your career objective, and list them first in your actual resumé. For example, if you are applying for a job in customer service, list your communication skills before your computer skills. While both are important, your communication skills are more in line with your career objective, and therefore should take priority.
As a final test, put yourself in the shoes of a potential employer. Cross-check the job description and make sure that you address the qualifications required for the job with the information on your resumé. Let your potential employer know you have what they are looking for and that you are aware of what qualities are most important, and you'll be sure to make a great impression.
