Chapter 18 Building Careers and Writing Resume

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1. Describe the approach most employers take to finding potential new employees.

· Understanding Employers’ Approach to the Employment Process

1. Build toward career

2. Prepare resume and other employment messages

3. Understand interview process

4. Prepare for interview

5. Participate in interview

6. Follow up and accept offer

· Organizing Your Approach to the Employment Process

· Researching Specific Companies

2. Explain the importance of networking in your career search

· Start networking now, your classmates could turn out to be some of your most important business contacts.

· Remember that you need contribute to the networking process,too

· Seeking Career Counseling

· Planning Your Resume

· When you view your resume as a persuasive business message, it is easier to decide what should and shouldn’t be in it.

· Gathering pertinent information

· Selecting the Best Medium

· Organizing your Resume around your Strengths

3. Discuss how to choose the appropriate resume organization and list the advantages and disadvantages of the three common options.

· The key to organizing a resume is aligning your personal strengths with both the general and specific qualities that your target employers are looking for.

· Frequent job changes and gaps in your work history are two of the most common issues that employers may perceive as weaknesses, so plan to address these if they pertain to you.

· The chronological resume is the most common resume approach, but it might not be right for you at a particular stage in your careers.

· The functional resume is often used by people with little employment history or with gaps in their work history, but some employers suspect that people who use this approach are trying to hide weaknesses in their backgrounds.

· If you don’t have a lot of work history, consider a combination resume to highlight your skills while still providing a chronological history of your employment.

· Writing your resume

· Keeping your resume honest

4. List the major sections of a traditional resume

· Be sure to provide complete and accurate contact information; mistakes in this section of the resume are surprisingly common.

· If you don’t already have one, get a professional-sounding e-mail address for business correspondence (such as first name, lastname@something.com, if you don’t already have one.

· A qualifications summary gives a quick overview of the value you can offer an employer

· Your education is likely to be one of your strongest selling points, so think carefully about how to present it.

· Whenever you can, qualify your accomplishment in numeric terms; sales increases, customer satisfaction scores, measured productivity, and so on.

· Completing your resume

5. Identify six different formats in which you can produce a resume

· Start with a traditional printed resume but realize that you may need to create several other versions during your job search.

· Using a PowerPoint presentation or a video can be a great way to supplement your resume, but not all employers will view them.

· Strive for a clean, classy look in your printed resume, using professional – grade paper and a clean, high-quality printer.

6.Describe what you should do to adapt your resume to a scannable format.

· Think carefully about the keywords you include in your scannable resume ;they need to appeal to recruiters and reflect your qualities accurately.

· A plain-text version of your resume is simply a computer file without any of the formatting that you typically apply using a word-processing program.

· Make sure you verify the plain-text file that you create with a word-processing program and adjust it as needed.

· You have many options for posting your resume online. Remember that you could be displaying your personal information for all the world to see, so think carefully about privacy and security.

Reference:

1. Resume Writing Examples

http://www.how-to-write-a-resume.org/resume_writing_examples.htm

2. Write a Cover Letter

http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/career/guides/cover_ltr.shtml

3. LetterWritingGuide

http://www.letterwritingguide.com/

We can learn how to write cover letter from above websites.