Hi Vanessa,
You are very welcome!
Robert Starks Jr.
Some of our students are career changers but we also have many first career students. I find assisting the younger, less experienced students the most challenging as they may never have created a resume in the past. Although many of them may have had retail postions or positions at a fast food restaurant, they have difficulty believing any work experience is important to include on a resume for if nothing else their experience of interacting with customers and coworkers is important experience.
Hi Kristine,
What is it that you do to help your less experienced students understand how to convey their non-industry experience, or, transferable skills?
Robert Starks Jr.
I advise my students when stating a skill to then list what the outcome was. Specifically, what positive result was then made because of the action they took in a particular position.
Hi Margaret,
That's an excellent way to frame your question to get students to sell benefits vs. responsibilities. Are your students able to easily identify the benefits or "value added" from their work or do you find they struggle with identifying the value-added contribution to the business/department/team?
Robert Starks Jr.
Before a student meets with me for resume writing, I give them a homework assignment. They are to write down a list of duties from other jobs they have held in the past.
Then, We go over them together at the meeting & I ask them to identify how those skills parlay to the Massage Therapy position they seek.
This has been very helpful because it helps them think outside the box, as many are career changers.
We are a vocational school that caters exclusively to one profession so all students are career changers or just preparing to enter the job market in their first job.
Before we meet formally, I ask that they put together a list of their career experiences with highlights of each. We use this as a starting point to parse out important attributes/qualities/talents that will specifically address areas in their new career field.
With younger students who don't have a lot of job experience, this can be a bit challenging so we dig a little further into their backgrounds to come up with other information that would be pertinent to the focus of the targeted opportunity.
Hi Cathy,
Excellent method. Do you use a standard questionnaire or some sort of other data collection instrument that standardizes the process? Make sure you download all the PDF files in the course - including a list of questions to elicit data for designing a resume. You may find some to add to what you already do. Enjoy the course!
Robert Starks Jr.
We are also a career school so most of our students have never worked in their fields of study. But as a career school they get a lot of hands-on experience in their labs as well as during their externships. I have them put together a list of qualifications that they bring to the table when they finish their programs. Some students understand that right away and do a great list of skills and others I have to jump-start a bit but in the end they all have a list of skills and qualifications that are most important to the hiring managers.
As a graphic design instructor, students in the program are very familiar with marketing. Still most have never written a good professional resume. We begin by having them do a self evaluation which includes them listing personality traits, professional skills, soft skills and skills that an employer would be looking for. They then develop a 30 second elevator speech which is used an introduction of themselves at their portfolio review as well as an objective on their resumes.
