Whether you’re a freshman dipping your toes into the professional world for the first time at the spring career fair or a senior hoping to find your dream job, one of the most vital elements of your goals is your resume. When structuring your resume, it is necessary to effectively communicate your experiences and skills while also conveying your personality and maintaining a professional air.

Below are some guidelines that may help you find a place to start with this daunting task, or even just help you enhance the quality of your resume.

Length

The first rule is to keep it short and sweet. Ideally, your resume should only be one page long. Whether you’re struggling to fit everything in a single page or struggling to fill that space, the best way to use your space would be to divide the page up into four parts: personal information, education, experience and other skills.

Sections

Personal information and education are two sections which take very minimal effort and are straightforward. Under personal information, mention your name, email, phone number and address. While doing this, make sure to highlight your name by either putting it in bold or increasing the font size. Under education, list your high school and the University along with your current GPA and expected graduation date.

Moving on to the experience section, ideally you should have between four and five experiences to list. In the event you have more than five experiences, try your best to include the ones you believe will add the most value to your profile. For example, if you’re focused on applying to marketing jobs and you have to choose between a marketing internship and a part-time job as a product tester, you would be better off including the marketing internship.

If you feel like you have more than five experiences but all of them add value to your resume, then you need to make a decision between adding more experiences and adding a short section for other skills.

Personally, I believe other skills is one section that makes you stand apart from other candidates because this is where you get to display your unique but relevant skills. Whether it be a popular software, a coding language or even a spoken language, anything you deem useful can go in this section.

Format

Formatting is one of the most important aspects of a professional document such as a resume. When you present a well-structured and properly edited document to your interviewer, it shows you’re detail-oriented and well organized.

Ensure all section headings are in capital letters and all the dates and durations of the experiences are listed in italics along with the location in which it took place.

Wording

It is very important that the job descriptions are explained concisely while using some, but not a lot, of related jargon to show a basic understanding in the field. Additionally, all bullet points must start with verbs and phrases such as gained experience or experienced operations, interacted with. Apart from that, it is also imperative proper punctuation is used when detailing the list of other skills.

Sonal is a freshman in Business.

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