Resume Resources: Proper Formatting
You should choose a style that is most flattering to you and one that showcases your strengths and skills to their best advantage. If you are undecided,start by writing a functional resume that will keep you focused on the relevant job skills.
Let’s look at the different resume styles and review the benefits of each.
Chronological Resume -
The chronological resume format arranges your work experience in order. Organize your information by date
beginning with your most recent experience and work backwards. If you have had a long career history with many job changes, your
work experience section should cover the last ten years of work history and the most relevant positions. If you have had numerous
positions over these years, only detail your last 3 or 4 positions. As you move further back into your work history the
number of accomplishments can be reduced. Include the rest of your positions as a listing by company (if different from
previous position), job title, and years. Do not detail every position that you have held.
Each position that you detail should include the company name, dates of employment, job title and a
brief responsibility statement. This responsibility statement includes quantifying information and is usually 1 - 3 sentences
in length. Follow this statement by listing your accomplishments – in bullet form – showing how you distinguished
yourself on that job.
Use a chronological resume:
- If you are staying in the same field and have had a steady work record.
- If you are staying in the same field and seeking a move to the next level of responsibility.
- If you are applying to a conservative company, as this is still the traditional style of resume.
Pro’s:
- Recruiters and writers are familiar and comfortable with this format.
- It’s easy to prepare and easy to read.
- It clearly shows your career path and progression.
Con’s:
- It illustrates gaps in employment.
- It shows frequent job changes or a patchy job history.
- It exposes any lack of career progress.
- It shows lack of relevant experience if you are seeking a career change.
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Functional Resume - The functional resume format emphasizes
your competencies and abilities and arranges your work experience by putting the descriptive details into skill-groupings. Since most skills and abilities are transferable, where those skills and abilities were used is of secondary importance. What is important is demonstrating that you have the skills that are required for the position.
You will still need to include a listing of your work experience by company name, job title, and dates of employment, in chronological order starting with your last job
first. This information immediately follows the last skill grouping and is usually found on page 2 of the resume.
Use a functional resume:
- If the skills required for the new job are not so obvious when someone looks only at your chronological job history.
- If you are changing careers or industries.
- If you don’t have a continuous record of paid employment.
- If there are substantial gaps in your employment history.
- If you have had a series of short-term jobs or contract positions.
Pro’s:
- Minimizes gaps in employment history or patchy experience.
- Eliminates most of the drawbacks of the chronological resume.
- Demonstrates scope of experience and can help eliminate monotonous repetition in similar job situations.
Con’s:
- More difficult to prepare as some people have problems identifying their specific skills and abilities and then arranging them in logical grouping.
- Unfamiliar format to most employers, and still not widely accepted.
- It can look suspicious, like you are trying to hide something.
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E-mailable Resume - The e-mailable resume can be read by anyone, regardless of the word processing software he or she is
using. Using the generic ASCII text file, your resume can be sent by e-mail to any address. ASCII is the abbreviation for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Usually, files saved in this format are referred to as Text files, and have the extension .txt Thus, your resume document file name might look like: BestResume.txt in your file explorer program.
When you create a file in a word processor (like WordPerfect or Microsoft Word) the program automatically formats and saves the file in a "native"
format, which includes codes that not all computers or software programs can read. However, an ASCII file is very generic – it has no special fonts margins, tabs, bold, italic or other formatting codes added.
When typing a resume to be sent by e-mail in a word processing program, don’t use any special bells and whistles. That means:
- Don’t use boldface, underline, italics, fonts, font size, margin settings etc.
- Tabs will disappear when you convert your file, so use your spacebar to move text over instead of tabs.
- Be careful of the "smart quotes" that many word processing programs automatically place when you press the "" key on your keyboard."
- Special characters will not translate when you save your file as ASCII text. That includes mathematical symbols, em-dashes, en-dashes, and any character that does not appear on your keyboard.
- Bullets are also limited to the characters on your keyboard. Some of the better symbol choices to highlight lines of text are:>, *, +.
- Be sure to use lots of white space.
- Set your line lengths to 60 characters, as longer line lengths won’t display properly and will look sloppy.
- Don’t let your sentences wrap to a new line – hit the enter key at the end of the line instead.
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