Thursday, July 21, 2011

Overdone Resumes

I recently helped a friend with his resume. I have some experience with this from coordinating the CIS internship program at PCCC, though I am certainly no expert. My resume is about two pages long at this point. I'm certain it could be improved upon, but I basically have only needed it to send in a book proposal to Pearson and to apply to teach part-time at Bergen. Since I am not an active job seeker, I have not done a lot of work on it.

Though I coordinated the internship program, our former internship coordinator was my resume expert, so I sort of learned by watching her edit resumes. When we would work with our students to get their resumes done, I would help them with the basics (list your jobs, what sort of responsibilities did you have, etc), and she would come around and really polish the resumes.

This Career Builder article discusses some of those cliches, and how you can clean some of them up:
Link to article

Of course, if you are an active student, your college probably has a Career Services office that will provide you with free resume help. I'd say that is something to take advantage of, whether you are at Passaic, Bergen, or elsewhere. Otherwise, once you start looking for a job, you will end up bugging a friend or maybe even paying a professional to do it.

1 comment:

AnnyV said...

Hi prof Cameron, i'm a former student of your Database class, and i just graduated from NJIT. I think it is very important that students use the advantages of the different workshops while in school. At NJIT there were a lot of workshops about writing resumes and days that experienced people, from the Career development services, took a look at our resumes and gave us feedback. As an student i must say that we need to look for those, because nobody school that might be of interest to us because nobody is gonna tell us when they are or where. I got a lot of friends who didn't even know this "Resume-mania" was going-on on campus and they regretted not being able to go to it.