Education

When listing academic achievements and any supplemental training, restrict your standing to post secondary education (unless submitting an entry level application). Summarize any company sponsored job training courses in a general statement unless space permits its expansion into greater detail. When applying for a position where a specific technical background is a prerequisite, summarize your qualifications by creating a new topic heading entitled “TECHNICAL SKILLS:”. This heading should be inserted just after “STRENGTHS:”. If appropriate, list your computer language skills, in this section. Make it easy for the reader to go through your résumé and highlight all of your abilities without having to read every line.

The placement of information elements in a résumé is critical. When confronted with dozens or even hundreds of résumés to review, a reader will often give each one a 5 second glance and make a decision to re-read or discard based upon that short a cursory view.

It is therefore important to have the most important facts about you presented in the first third of the document. Catch their eye. Grab their attention, and get placed in the re-read pile.

Hints & Tips:

• It is important to keep your résumé short and to the point. Present your lists of educational standings, technical skills, or supplemental training as 2 or 3 across columns. Use the TABLE function of your Word Processor to set this format up.
• Do not reference your education with any dates. This will only alert the reader to your age. The dates are really not relevant as people have often taken continuing education or other courses throughout their careers to further self development.
• If you attended but did not complete a college or university course, rephrase your description to read, “Western University, Studied Economics”. By the time the reader realizes that you haven’t graduated, you will already be at the interview stage and can hopefully impress him or her with your life experience and practical knowledge.