Tonight’s Plan:
- Review Job Coding
- Review Your Job Ads
- Generating Content for Your Resume (and Cover Letter)
- Homework
Generating Content for a Professional Resume
Strategy: The Brain Dump. List all of the things you can do. Think of when/where you’ve done them. Let’s think about the coding sheet we used for the last project, and let’s pick out 4-6 skills that you think are your strong suit. List them. Brain Dump.
A few resources on translating academic work and teaching into professional job materials:
- Hook&Eye–let’s read the first paragraph
- Hook&Eye–Translating skills
- Inside Higher Education, Resumes in Translation
- UPenn Converting Your CV into a Resume
- Teacher Career Coach: Transferable Skills
- The #Alt-Ac Job Search 101: Writing a Résumé, Part I – The Master List
Wright & Dol. See article attachment; see sample resume description [could this go in a resume or a cover letter? Top of the resume for a person? Or bottom of a resume? Where to position this?]. See Wonderlic.
Another resource to help identify strengths/compatibility: Big Five personality test.
Here is my heuristic/template for starting a resume
How to Conceptualize Cover Letters
As we discussed last week (and I imagine we will discuss further tonight), a big challenge with resumes concerns constructing a document that can beat a machine and at the same time engage a human. It is a balancing act.
At least that is one hurdle with which we don’t need to deal with cover letters. The challenge of the cover letter is to convey, in a few short paragraphs, the value (explicitly?) and energy (implicitly?) you will add to an organization. In addition to being a high stakes writing sample, it is also an elevator pitch, an introduction, a first date, a sales proposal, an intellectual and professional biography. A lot has to happen quickly.
I’ll offer the following outline for cover letters:
- First paragraph. First sentence: position for which you are applying. “Thesis statement” as to why you are a good fit and/or interested in the position [pay attention to the specifics in your add, look for tests/prompts/possibilities].
- Second paragraph. Storytime. Chances are your thesis involves something you can do. Tell a story about the time you did the thing. Are you applying for a marketing job? Tell a story about how you developed content for a social media channel. Applying for a grant writing position? Tell a story about the time your under/graduate class partnered with a local non-profit and you researched/developed stuff and/or liaised with folks to do things. Ideally, your story should have a what I did–what effect that had narrative structure, but it doesn’t have to. The point here is to take one thing you discuss in the resume, the best thing, and turn it into a paragraph of meaningful prose.
- Third paragraph. Do you have a second awesome story? Cool. Tell that too! If not, then think about how you can translate your academic success and abilities into language that shows you are a strong fit for the position. If the ad stresses personality, then can you use something like the psychometric test to sell yourself? Is there something that the ad indicates as a requirement that you can indicate you are familiar with (or something similar, that given your familiarity with Adobe Photoshop and Premiere, you are confident that you will be able to learn InDesign quickly and/or given your interest in expanding into digital marketing, you are currently enrolled in a HubSpot social media marketing certification course?)
- Concluding paragraph. Open with a reiteration of your interest in the position. Close with the standard stuff–you look forward to an interview to further discuss your qualifications / the position (is it about them? Or about you?)
