How to teach your students to write a winning resume

Are you a high school teacher teaching your students to write their very first resume? Or are you a college professor leading your senior class through a resume-writing workshop? A resume needs to emphasize the best skills, qualifications, and experiences your students have. Here are four sections that you must cover in your resume-writing teaching session:

The formatting

The first thing your students must do is pick the right resume format for them. There are three resume formats as the chronological resume, functional resume, and the combination resume. The students with more volunteer, internship, or work experience can choose a chronological resume format while those with less work experience should go for a functional resume format. Guide your students to select one or two professional fonts for their resumes such as Times New Roman, Calibri, or Cambria, in a size between 10 and 12 pt. Ask them to highlight resume section headings using block capitals and bold text.

The name and the contact information

Teach your students that their names need to be the most prominent things on their resumes. When writing a resume, you must always use a larger font size for your name. Ensure that you center or left-align the name so that it is the first thing an employer sees on the resume. The name must be followed by a resume headline. A resume headline is a single line that opens the resume by highlighting a skill or achievement of your student. Then comes the contact information. Guide your students to add their phone number, email address, city and state, and a link to their LinkedIn profile.

The resume sections

There are a few mandatory sections for a resume. These sections give the basic information an employer needs to know about your students’ careers. Ask your students to create the following sections for their resumes:

• Resume Summary – This is a short paragraph of 2-4 sentences that outlines the entire career of your students. Ask them to highlight a few skills and achievements on their resume summary statements.
• Education – A completed education section lists all the educational qualifications of your students in reverse chronological order. Each entry of this section must mention the educational qualification, college, location, relevant years, and related coursework.
• Key skills – A good key skills section mentions 10-15 relevant professional skills of your students. Each skill should be highlighted with a bullet point.
• Work experience – Guide your students to list their work experience on their resumes in reverse chronological order. Each job entry must consist of the job title, company name, location, and relevant years, followed by a bulleted list of professional achievements.

Other than these sections, your students can create many additional sections for their resumes. Some examples of additional resume sections are:

• Volunteer work
• Projects
• Languages
• Publications
• Patents
• Hobbies and Interests

If your students have trouble finding work experience to put down on their resumes, this article explains everything about writing a resume with no work experience.

The bullet points