There are different styles of presenting your resume credentials such as your previous work experience and your educational background. Remember that your resume credentials prove your worth as a potential employee. This is the part where you advertise your qualifications to your prospective employer and you have to be clever, if not concise in selling your worth as a potential employee. It has been said that a resume with substance, meaning, filled with relevant qualifications, can take you places. But some resumes, regardless of its content, fail to capture the attention of recruiters. Why? Perhaps it lacks presentation and maybe it failed to present your strongest suits and bored the recruiter and switched to the next resume.
Date, relevance or both? These are the bases for the basic styles of presenting your credentials. As you read along, refer to your resume once in a while as well, and take note of what else can be improved in terms of its presentation.
Sort by Date. The chronological style is the most commonly used and seen among millions of resumes. The work experience and educational background are usually presented in this manner starting with the most recent entry to the oldest. For your work experiences, the heading for each entry should be the job or the position you held. It should entail your job functions, the skills required for the job, your achievements and other forms of participation related to the position you held. This style of listing credentials is useful for applicants who continuously have different jobs but have short gaps in between them because it shows how much you have progressed or how far or advanced you have become in your life as a professional.
Sort by Relevance. The functional style is useful if you opt to present your skills according to the most relevant to the position you are aspiring for. These skills may be inherent or developed as a result of multiple work experiences of diverse nature. This style is also useful for professionals who desire to switch gears in their career path or as mentioned, have a long list of work experiences but are not necessarily relevant to the position applied for. A different section, named as Core Skills, should be added. Under which, the heading for each entry should be the core skills that you wish to present and each entry should be sorted from the most relevant or the closest match to the job requirements set by the employer. Each core skill heading may then have several previous work experiences listed under it. And as for the work experience section, this may simply list your previous professional experiences which may then be sorted chronologically but no explicit details are provided since these can be found under the core skills section.
Combination. This combines both formats but unlike the first two, another section, the Summary of Qualifications, is added which gives the recruiters a bird's eye view of what the applicant has to offer for the company. Most recruiters favor this style because it entices them to at least read this part alone, for them to have an idea of the applicant's skills and credentials. This should contain your core skills and capabilities, a brief description of your work experiences and your college degree and post-graduate achievements, if applicable. The rest of the resume, particularly the educational background and the work experience sections may be listed chronologically.
Resume writing is an art or a systematic art to be exact. Your resume should be both substantial and presented in a concise, straight-forward and professional manner so recruiters and employers would not look past it. Remember that nowadays, presentation and substance not only go hand-in-hand but can go a long way for your career too.
