The Anatomy of a Resume

Throw away the internet templates! The anatomy of a resume is important for relevance, familiarity, and showmanship of your accomplishments, but an artistic approach with fancy, colorful boxes and side bars are confusing to the reader and do not convey the creativity that you are looking to gain ground with. You can include a number of different sections in your resume. Placement of each section should be based on relevance and timeliness of your current position. Most parts of a resume are familiar and are mandatory; your education and your business affiliations. You can include a personal section only when it provides personal skills or achievements which can be related to the job. Education

In every resume, you should include a section on your education. Include the dates of attendance or the date you received your degree(s). You'll have to give this information when you make a formal application so that the potential employer can check on your credentials. Unless you earned some spectacular kind of honor in college, say Phi Beta Kappa, simply list the universities and colleges you attended, in reverse chronological order, along with any certificates or degrees you earned. Recent graduates with limited work experiences, can include more information in their education section including awards, accolades and merits that show that you are a professional. Dean's list awards for excellence will stand out more than your experience as the greek life keg party coordinator unless you are applying for a job in nightlife promotions, so think about all of your accomplishments, write them out on paper and see what is relevant to the job you are applying for.

Business Affiliations

This section is included when you write a professional resume and most simply call it "WORK EXPERIENCE", which is fine. It is placed immediately after the education section if you are new graduate looking for entry level work, but it should be listed ahead of your education if you have relevant work experience. In it, you simply list the companies you worked for and your job title. If you have been working as a consultant, you may head this section "Clients." You can include some identifier, such as "a division of-" when you worked for a subsidiary of a major corporation, and give some idea about the line of business and its location.

With each business affiliation, you can include a brief section of accomplishments. here is a trick and tip for your job descriptions -

1. make sure that each thought is one separate line

2. used past tense power verbs to describe each task

3. figure out a way to qualify or quantify each accomplishment

4. never repeat something that you already said

This is the trickiest part of a resume and one that I take an incredible amount of time construct, so give this more thought than any other section.

Professional Development

If you've had short courses and seminars, list them if they're important to the job title shown on your resume. For jobs in which professional certification or membership in professional or trade organizations is a must, this heading should be included. Include business and community organization memberships that show your competence and dedication to your profession.

If you're listed in any of the Who's Who books, it's nice to include it. Briefly identify any other honors. Published papers and books also add to your credibility, so list them in a standard bibliographic format. List the organizations before which you made major presentations and include a brief title of your topic. Military Experience

Most resume writers will say that you may choose to include this or not, depending upon your rank and whether or not the experience your military service provided is transferable to civilian life, but I believe that the respect for your service, the organizational and stress management skills that you possess from your time serving speak volumes about your character and it should be included without exception.

Skills Profile

This section can be included on a Professional resume at the very top of the page if it is most relevant. You can list the skills and knowledge areas in which you are an expert and you may also include areas in which you have a working knowledge, if you think that would be advantageous. You'll write different resumes for different purposes. If you're only going to write one resume, the best format is probably the Achievement/Chronological Resume which is what all of these sections add up to. However, to write that one correctly, you'd have to do all of the work it would take to write both an Achievement and a Chronological resume first, so you can't do that one resume just to save time and effort.

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