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RE: Education at the top of a resume screams "ENTRY LEVEL"
Subject:RE: Education at the top of a resume screams "ENTRY LEVEL" From:Christine -dot- Anameier -at- seagate -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 20 Jul 2001 15:57:09 -0500
A different Christine wrote:
"I see my 1-year of experience as a weakness at this point and am trying to
'accentuate the positive'."
Whoa! I have to disagree with you there. Don't hide your one year of
experience by putting it after computer skills and education. Experience,
ANY relevant experience, should go at the top. You'd be surprised how far 1
year can get you. With zero years, you struggle like mad to break into the
field. With one year, if you present yourself well, you're suddenly a
viable candidate for at least some positions.
If I were you, I'd put TW experience first, then teaching and curriculum
design experience, which is more likely to be relevant than your
translation experience. (Unless you're working on a translation project.)
You can make a good case for teaching being a valuable background for a
tech writer: as a teacher you learn to (1) figure out what your audience
needs to know and (2) convey the information to them without making them
feel dumb. A teaching background also suggests that you can work
independently and show some initiative; you had to take the reins in the
classroom, so you're not likely to hang back and wait passively for
instructions now. Curriculum design experience shows that you have some
idea of how to structure information for maximum digestibility.
I have a teaching background and English BA myself. It took me several
months to break into the field four years ago, so I had lots of practice
working on my spiel.
FWIW, my resume is structured like this:
1. Expertise -- a brief and clear statement of my selling points. I want to
tell companies what I have to offer, not tell them (via "Objective") what I
hope to get from them. We had a thread about this very topic just recently.
2. Experience -- first my tech writing experience, describing the projects
and mentioning gracefully the tools I used to create them. (The fact that I
know RoboHelp is not my main strength, not by a long shot. But for the more
tool-obsessed recruiters and employers and OCR resume scanners, it's
there.) Then my marketing writing experience and my teaching experience.
The only differentiation I make between the TW jobs and these other ones is
in the job title. They're all absolutely relevant and I don't want to imply
otherwise by putting my non-TW experience in a separate section. For the
marketing writing and teaching experience, I emphasize the aspects of the
work that matter now.
3. Education -- my almost-MA and honors BA are here; I think I even mention
Phi Beta Kappa, if I remember right. (I haven't tinkered with this section
of my resume in so long, I've forgotten.)
In my Expertise section, after describing my strengths, I do mention a
couple of tools--and recently a recruiter advised me to move them out of
there. Keep them on the resume somewhere, but not at the top.
> I only have 2 writing jobs . . . .
Excellent! That's two chunks of experience you can describe before you go
into the prior, non-TW experience.
>I also hope that the teaching stuff can be viewed in terms
>of curriculum design and relevant for creating training
>materials, etc.
Don't leave that to chance. Emphasize those elements when you summarize
that experience on your resume. Talk about it in the interview.
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