Challenge:
A job seeker asked, “How can I determine which of my career accomplishments are relevant enough to incorporate into my resume?”
Acknowledgement:
This is a question that many job seekers struggle with when building or updating their resume. Never fear, my proven strategy is here to help you make the right selections. You won’t believe how easily you can accomplish this task.
Strategy Steps:
The secret to successfully identifying your relevant career accomplishments lies in the vacancy announcement for your target position. Study it to learn exactly what the employer wants in their new team member.
The steps to follow are: 1) Identify the top three to four most-impactful duty statements; 2) Determine what skills each of those duty statements requires; 3) Identify your career accomplishments related to the required skills; 4) Select which resume type you will use; and 5) Showcase those selected accomplishment on your resume.
Strategy Details:
Strategic Steps
- First, identify the top three to four duty statements? Determine this by using your familiarity with the career field and ranking each duty statement. Rank them from most-impactful to least impactful. Today, more hiring managers now write job descriptions. So, the duty statements may not be listed in that order. So, use your familiarity with the career field of choice to easily identify the most-impactful duty statements. For example, filing would not be a highly-impactful duty statement for an Accountant. Analyzing debits and credits, or balancing income statements would be highly-impactful to an Accountant position.
- Next, review each impactful duty statements to determine the skills the position requires for success. List the skills that you would need to successfully perform the duties. Maybe they include, strong written or verbal communications. Maybe strong project management skills or interpersonal skills are required. Conduct this analysis for any vacancy announcement, regardless of career field.
- Then, think about how you have exhibited these skills during your career? Now, think about your career accomplishments. List the knowledge, skills, and abilities that you had to use to be successful on the job. Select the accomplishments that required you to use the needed knowledge, skills, and abilities. Rank them in order of the most job-related to the least.
- Now, select your resume type. If you are new to your career field, the Chronological resume will likely serve you best. The Functional resume usually works best for more experienced job seekers, or those who have gaps in their work history. The Chronological resumes works best for research or academic positions. Then, I sometimes like to utilize a hybrid format of all three.
- Finally, include your relevant accomplishments on your resume. Each resume type has a specific location for career accomplishments. So, simply list your career accomplishments in order of most job-related to least job-related.
Conclusion:
So, as you see, you can strategically identify, rank, and select your most relevant career accomplishments based on the needs of your target job.
I hope that you find this information helpful in your job search. If so, wherever you’re viewing this, do me a favor. Scroll down and leave me a message. I would love to hear from you.
As always, Career Search Success to You! Go Get Your New Job!
