Resume Writing - OTHER POINTERS

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Resume Writing - OTHER POINTERS

Use the samples in this book as guides in preparing your resume. Make a draft of one or several resumes, and then make an appointment to have it/them reviewed by the nursing career counselor in Career Services. You may also want to show the resume both to a person involved in the particular nursing field to which you are applying, and to another person with no connection at all to the nursing field. A variety of viewpoints will help you make more informed choices. If you would like to see additional nursing resumes, a copy of last year's Nursing Resume Book is in the nursing section of the Career Services library. This book contains resumes of many B.S.N. and M.S.N. Penn graduates.

Layout is crucial to the impression your resume makes. Resumes are skimmed before they are read, so use indentations, capitalizations, spacing, boldfacing, italics, and underlining to make it easy for the reader to find all the pertinent information. Try to have the most important information "jump off the page" when readers take an initial glance at your resume. A good check for whether or not your resume is effective is to show the resume for 5 or 10 seconds to a friend and then ask them which points they remember, or what items they saw first.

While it is important to include dates in each section (i.e., when you received degrees, worked at particular jobs, etc.) they do not need to be the first thing read. This could mean including them on the right rather than the left side of the resume or incorporating them into position descriptions.

Omit personal information such as date of birth, marital status, social security number, height, weight, etc. This information does not reflect on your ability to perform the job for which you are being considered.

Have your resume printed on good quality heavy bond paper. Xerox paper is not good enough quality. Remember, your resume will form the first impression someone has of you, so appearance matters. Some people prefer to use a computer package which has a professional typeface and options for bold type, italics, etc. Try to explore options which will allow you to add visual excitement to your resume. If you don't have a computer at home, the computer lab at the School of Nursing has computers and provides training. When printing your resume, avoid dot matrix printers - the best option is a laser printer. Various locations on campus and local copy stores have facilities for using high quality typefaces and printers (Note: Two page resumes should never be copied front and back on one sheet. Use two sheets. The examples in this packet are copied this way to save paper).