ST. MARK COLLEGE of baliuag, Bulacan, inc.

JP. Rizal St. Sta. Barbara, Baliuag Bulacan

Email: [email protected] | Tel. No. 305-5264

Name: ___________________________
Grade and Section: _________________
Reading and Writing Skills
Module #: 7 11
Date: ______________________________

What Is a Resume?

A resume is a formal document that provides an overview of your professional qualifications,

including your relevant work experience, skills, education, and notable accomplishments.
Usually paired with a cover letter, a resume helps you demonstrate your abilities and convince
employers you’re qualified and hireable.
The spelling of “résumé” actually originates from French, and means “summary.” To this day,
the purpose of a resume is still to provide employers with a summary of your relevant
qualifications.

If you’re applying for a job, you need at least a resume to be considered for the position.
On a base level, a resume is made up of the following five parts:
• Contact details
• Introduction
• Educational background
• Work history
• Relevant skills

The Purpose of a Resume

Many job seekers assume that the purpose of a resume is to provide a full overview of their
professional history.
Instead, the goal of your resume is to convince employers you’re worth interviewing. To that
end, your resume is a valuable tool you can use to highlight your experience to prospective
employers.
If your resume provides a concise summary of your relevant qualifications and skills in a format
that makes your ability to handle the work as clear as possible, you will get more interviews.

What Do I Include on a Resume?

What you should put on your resume depends on the job you’re applying for and your relevant
professional background.
At a minimum, your resume should include the following sections:
• Contact details: include your first and last name, phone number, and email address.
Additionally, you can add your LinkedIn profile if yours is up to date, and your mailing address if
you want to prove you live near the place you’re applying.
• Introduction: a concise overview of your professional background and key
qualifications. Your introduction can be in the form of a resume summary, professional profile,
resume objective, or qualifications summary.
• Education: Include your school names, highest degree earned, majors and minors.
Additionally, you can add your GPA (if it’s greater than 3.8) and relevant coursework if you lack
experience or it’s related to the position.

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• Experience: list any relevant work experience you have. Include your title, the company
you worked for, years worked, and a bulleted list of your key responsibilities and notable
successes. Be sure to also include as many relevant accomplishments on your resume as
possible.
• Skills: include any resume skills you possess that are relevant to the position. Be sure to
use a strong mix of hard skills and soft skills to demonstrate that you’re a well-rounded
candidate.

Types of Resumes
A common misconception is that there’s only one way to write a resume. There’s actually a
variety of resume formats, and each one has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Depending on your specific skill set or work history, one format might be better suited to
highlight your qualifications than another.
For reference, there are four main types of resumes:
• Chronological resumes
• Functional resumes
• Targeted resumes
• Combination resumes
To help you understand the differences between each resume format and decide which is the
best fit for you, here’s a detailed breakdown:

Chronological Resumes
A chronological resume opens with an introduction, and then provides an overview of your
professional history in reverse-chronological order (meaning your most recently held position is
listed at the top).
The chronological resume format is the most common type of resume used by job seekers
today, and is suitable for candidates with a variety of different experience levels.

Functional Resumes
A functional resume is formatted to focus on your skills and abilities, rather than your
chronological work history. It’s preferred by professionals who want to draw attention away from
their traditional work experience, such as those who are changing careers or have significant
gaps in their work history.
While similar to other resume formats, functional resumes are unique a few key ways:
• The resume introduction and skills section are longer and more detailed than usual.
• The work experience section is de-emphasized.

Targeted Resumes
A targeted resume is a resume tailored for each position you apply to.
This means highlighting any highly relevant skills and experience you have, and writing your
resume to focus on these qualifications.
To write a strong targeted resume, scan through the job listing for the position you want to fill.
Typically, hiring managers include the skills, responsibilities, and traits that they want
candidates to possess in the job description. Then, highlight these qualities on your resume to
demonstrate that you’re an ideal fit for the position (if you have them).

Combination Resumes
A combination resume is a format that (true to its name) combines the best aspects of a
functional resume and a chronological resume.
While a chronological resume focuses heavily on experience and a functional resume
emphasizes skills, a combination resume typically leverages both work history and skills equally

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to demonstrate your qualifications.
Combination resumes are ideal for candidates who have extensive experience or a highly
developed set of skills that they want to showcase.
Why Resumes Are Important for Job Seekers?

Your resume, along with a cover letter, is an essential part of the hiring process, and is a base
requirement to be considered for a position.
A good resume is the first part of your application any hiring manager will see, so it’s important
that it conveys your qualifications accurately and convincingly.
Your resume should offer employers a digestible overview of your relevant skills, employment
history, education background, and accomplishments. Based on this information, they can make
an informed decision about whether or not they want to interview or hire you.
But writing a resume from scratch can be time-consuming. To simplify the process, try using our
online resume builder. Just type in your information and our software will help you assemble a
perfectly formatted resume that is sure to impress any hiring manager.

How long should a resume be in 2020?

A typical resume should be one or two pages long.
• One page resumes are ideal for recent grads, entry-level resumes, or in-person
networking
• Two page resumes are great for most job seekers, particularly those with five-plus years
experience in their current field
• Three page resumes might benefit accomplished senior-level workers or technical
professionals with large bodies of work

How long should your resume be?

One of the many frustrating things for job seekers is that there aren’t definitive rules when it
comes to resume page count. A few strong opinions aside, the prevailing advice is that your
resume should be exactly as long as it needs to be and no longer, while also being as brief as
possible without selling yourself short.
This advice is squishy, subjective, and open for interpretation. Most job seekers land
somewhere in the one-to-three page range, yet some two page resumes would be much better
off as one, and vice versa.
Where exactly should you draw the line?

Contributions to resume length

There aren’t many hard and fast answers when it comes to how long a resume should be. It’s
dependent on the specifics of your personal experiences. Some factors that determine your
resume length include:

• Resume format and style

• How long you’ve been working
• How long you’ve been working in your target field
• How much you’ve moved up within your field
• How many times you’ve changed jobs
• Whether or not you’ve completed higher education
• Whether your higher education aligns with your target field
• The depth of your skill set relevant to the job
• Whether your field is highly technical and/or project-based

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These and other aspects of your experience might compound into a resume draft that is four or
five or ten pages long. There’s no harm in a long first draft, but just as the Changing Times
article suggests, the next step is to “cut ruthlessly.”

The myth of the one page resume

The hard “rule” you’re most likely to encounter is that your resume should be exactly one page
long, no exceptions. Many still stand by this advice.
One page made a lot more sense when it was more common to mail, fax, or physically hand
your resume to a stranger, but technology has mitigated many of the associated concerns. For
example, the second page of an email attachment won’t get lost in the shuffle, or a page break
won’t make much of a different within an applicant tracking system (ATS).
Here are some of the other reasons this advice persists beyond the fear of lost pages and
pokey staples.
Resume guidelines must progress with your career
Most of us first learned how to write a resume when we were in high school or college. At that
time in our lives, many of us were taught to never ever exceed a single page.
This made sense at the time. Most of us didn’t have the experience to warrant two pages. The
problem is that as we’ve developed our careers, we’ve carried that advice with us. The
guidelines need to change once you’ve accomplished a few things as a professional.
The six second resume challenge
Perhaps the most cited piece of information in support of the one page resume is a 2012 study
by the Ladders in which recruiters were found to spend an average of six seconds reviewing
each resume before deciding how to proceed.

“Six seconds” is a tough pill for job seekers to swallow when they might spend hours crafting
their resume, never mind the emotional toll of a job search. In this context, it’s reasonable to
assume that the second page of your resume is invisible.
No job seeker could effectively state their case in six seconds if recruiters carefully read every
word of each inbound resume. That’s just not how most recruiters operate. Experienced
recruiters can do a lot in just six seconds.
The study found that recruiters spent most of their time skimming for:

• Name
• Job titles and companies
• Start and end dates (experience level)
• Education
• Particular skills and keywords

A good recruiter doesn’t need the full six seconds to recognize that someone is an obvious “no.”
They don’t need much more time than that to determine that someone might be worth a phone
call. A second page isn’t going to slow down their skimming.
What could slow them down is a one page resume packed to the margins with information. A
one page resume that is difficult to process is far less valuable than a two or three page resume
that is well structured and easy to

Task:
Make your own resume. The resume itself should be in two pages only.