Job descriptions are designed to paint the picture of what you can do for a company by describing what you have done in the past. Like I said in the previous post, “past behaviour predicts future actions.” What did you do in your job? What were the results?
Remember these points when writing your job descriptions:
- use bullet points for the job descriptions.
- keep each description no longer than 1 1/2 lines and no shorter than half a line.
- take out any extraneous words until just the bare minimum is there to get the point across. Now is not the time to pop in fluff words.
- Always start with an action verb like Initiated, Resolved, Trained, Supervised, Mentored, Applied, Calculated, Repaired, or Developed etc.
- If you are still with your current employer make sure the action verb is in present tense, all others should be in past tense (e.g. “Initiate” if you are still working with the employer and “Initiated” if you are not.)
- Use as many bullet points as needed to cover the most relevant aspects of your job duties. If some of the duties don’t apply to the job you want, leave them out.
For Chronological resumes, jobs are listed with the most recent one first. If you have worked for many years you may leave out jobs from the beginning of your career. I would suggest that you not go back more than 10 years unless those jobs are extremely relevant to the position you want now.
The last post in this series will cover how to handle education and training.
Until then,
