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instead of concentrating so much on summarizing your skills and experience?which certainly needs to happen?i would concentrate more on targeting the resume. (yes, this implies a bit of thought, research, and more than one version of your resume.) not only will a targeted resume be more effective, imo, but in the process of targeting your resume, you will necessarily be making editorial decisions that will accomplish a summary, all the better that it will be a targeted summary.
there is no reason to toss your audience analysis skills out the window just because you?re writing your own resume! determine your audience. determine what they are looking for. consider what they are trying to accomplish. under what conditions will they be reading your resume? one of my mantras is to imagine my audience saying, ?what?s in it for me??
i won?t tell you that your resume shouldn?t be 4 pages long, but i will ask you to imagine yourself in a job where you?ve been asked to hire someone. would you read through a stack of 4-page resumes? unless you?ve got a resume fetish and too much time on your hands, i think you would probably look at the first page, and if it didn?t grab you within 2 seconds, you?d move on to the next resume...assuming you haven?t already been interrupted by something else.
i?ve heard about studies that examined how our eyes look at text and images on paper. it?s the first third of the page that is the most crucial. ultimately, i think you have 2-5 seconds and the top third of your first page to sell yourself. and if i?m an employer looking for someone to document my medical device, i couldn?t care less if on page 3 you tell me how the programmers at company x raved about your java documentation.
easy to spout all this off. harder to do. personally, i hate writing and editing my resume.
-diotima
ps: i'd be interested to hear different opinions on this.
>How does one go about updating a resume after one has started...
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