RE: Updating Resume?

["Giordano, Connie" <connie -dot- giordano -at- twcable -dot- com>]

I would love to hear some non U.S. folks chime in on this one.  I worked
with several friends in the UK to develop their resumes, and the
two-page max requirement seems to be very much an American phenomenon.
These folks were relatively young, and worried that their CV's were only
three or four pages.  I know that resumes and CVs are not technically
the same thing, but I'm curious to find out whether their experience was
common.

By the way, full resume is 5 pages, I have four shortened versions that
focus on different areas, but none is less than three pages.  Doesn't
seem to have hurt me in the least, in either full-time or contract work.

Regards,

Connie P. Giordano
Contract Technical Writer
Time Warner Cable
(704) 731-3755 (office)
(704) 957-8450 (cell)
 
"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."  -Walt Disney

-----Original Message-----
From: bounce-techwr-l-175203 -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:bounce-techwr-l-175203 -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf Of diotima
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 10:49 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Re: Updating Resume?



my thoughts on resumes:



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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