How to prepare a good resume

A resume - also called 'Curriculum Vitae' or 'CV' is a summary of your skills, education and work experience. A good resume demonstrates how your skills and abilities match up with the requirements of a job.

A lot of job seekers do not know how to prepare a resume. They think it is just a piece of paper where they will put their personal information and work experience. Every time I look at some resume of an applicant I find it funny to see some work experiences being presented that are irrelevant to the job applied for. Basing on my experience as a member of the hiring committee before, I would love to see a resume with the following content.

1. Career objective. Although it is optional but a clear objective will let the employer know what job you want to end up with. This will show how much you have thought about your future career.

2. Personal Information. Full name, contact details such address, telephone number(s) and email address. For email address, create a good email address that is more professional. Most job seekers, especially the fresh graduates, have a bad email addresses. Email addresses like devil_me@yahoo.com, jackthewack@gmail.com and the likes are not good to the eyes of the employers. The safest thing to do is create accounts using your name.

3. Work Experience. Start with your most recent work history and work backwards chronologically, listing the name of the employer, your job title, the dates you worked there, and your responsibilities, tasks and achievements. List all work experiences that you think is relevant to the job you are applying for.

4. Skills. Enumerate your skills. I would suggest you put a simple grading system like highest – lowest (1-5) and rate your skills accordingly. Remember to enumerate the skills that are relevant to the job you are applying for.

5. Academic Record. This is very important for fresh graduates. Since they do not have enough work experience to showcase it is very important to include their academic achievements in the resume.

6. Character Reference. Personally I do not like to see a resume with “upon request” under character reference. This is an important section of the resume because employers want to know what others are saying about you.

7. Grammar and Spelling. Observe your grammar and spelling very carefully. If you need somebody to check your resume, it would be much better.

8. Presentation. A clean and good choice of font size and type is a very important. Employers looking at your resume will find you uninteresting if you don’t know how to present your resume. Unless you are applying for a graphics designer you may put some art into your resume. Always remember simplicity is an art.