Advice on Resumes

[Peter Collins <peter -dot- collins -at- BIGFOOT -dot- COM>]

Stark asked for some advice about Resumes.

Stark,
    Simple answer - it all depends - not much help, perhaps. For a new
graduate, one page may be more than enough, and perhaps you could embed it
in your email. If you have thirty years of complex consulting experience on
hundreds of significant projects, one page would only describe you and your
general ability - merely naming the clients, project names and dates would
take several pages and give little idea of your capabilities.
    For commercial consulting proposals, typical practice is to give a
paragraph or so of general description and then full descriptions of a
number of those more recent projects that show the skills relevant to the
proposal.
    But company personnel officers read for different information than
does a client proposal assessment team. Typically they want all the details
about everything. For some of us that becomes a big document, and layout
for easy reading is essential, both to help the reader's navigation and as
a demonstration of your skills. To preserve that layout you need to
distribute it formatted.
    Now, what format to choose?
    Word6 is probably the most accessable standard these days for Win and
Mac platforms - it can also be read by Word97 and up, and imports into most
other WP programs. Microsoft also provide Wordview, free, to read it. If
you Protect the doc in Word and perhaps in Windows Explorer set the file to
File | Properties | Attributes | Read Only, the file won't get accidently
changed by the reader.
    To be more certain of formatting, you could send it as PDF but I
haven't heard of that being done and perhaps not many Human Resources
departments have Acrobat Reader, though it is free.
    However you send your resume, include an offer to send it in any other
format they require, or expanded, contracted, or even painted green if they
wish. Mine is also in HTML on my web site in two versions. I usually send
the smaller as a Word6 file and offer the larger as an option. Some are
happy with the smaller, some are happy to refer to the web site for the
full version, others ask me to send the fuller as a Word file, too. You
can't second-guess them - what is right for one will be wrong for the next.
    Just present yourself as willing and flexible.

    This subject got an airing only two or three days ago - and a month or
so before that, but the above is additional to what you will find in the
archives.
    To see my resumes, click on the web URL below and then follow the link
to 'my sample writings'.
    Please let me know, eventually, what you decided and how it worked out.
P
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Peter Collins, VIVID Management Pty Ltd,
26 Bradleys Head Road, MOSMAN NSW 2088, Australia
+61 2 9968 3308, fax +61 2 9968 3026, mobile +61 (0)18 419 571
Management Consultants and Technical Writers
email: peter -dot- collins -at- bigfoot -dot- com                ICQ#: 10981283
Short stories and CV: http://www.angelfire.com/pe/pcollins/
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