Your resume can be anywhere between one and two pages long. Most resumes, especially for young professionals and recent college grads, we push you towards having a one page resume. This can vary a little bit field by field and discipline by discipline. And with each specific situation that you might find yourself in. If you're a non-traditional student or you have military experience or something, you might be looking at a two page resume just because you have a little bit more that you've accomplished at this point in life. That said, if you have a two page resume, you need to ask yourself what exactly am I using this extra page for. Is the things that could be in the exercise we did in module five, highlighted and kind of shown as this is relative towards those job posting? Or these just things I think is important? You want your resume to be things that the employer is going to view as important. You need to also think situationally about your resume. Are you at a career fair? If you're at a career fair or some sort of networking event, a one page resume can be great. Because it's just one piece of paper that you hand to an employer, and then they can take and they can look at, instead of two pages that they're shuffling around. One page is just more convenient for those kinds of situations. But typically when you're applying online or you're sending your email, an email out with your resume as a PDF, if it's two pages it's just a matter of scrolling the mouse wheel a little bit and that's going to be fine. So if your resume is a little bit longer than a page and it's all relevant information towards what it is you're applying for, that's okay, you're going to be okay. There's no real strong answer to this. I like to tell students to think about if you were to look at your resume from one arm length away. So hold your resume away from yourself. Where does you eye go at first? And your eye's going to first go to wherever the most bullet points are. So keep that in mind. You can use bullet points as a strategy to drive the employer's focus towards one particular experience that you've had that you think is the most relevant. Some experiences might not require a bullet point. Others might require one or two. Some of them might require three for four. I've seen some experiences, depending on the length of them, up to five, six, seven. I've even seen eight bullet points before. It's all situational, but, by and large, just consider that you want your biggest and most relevant experience to have the most bullets. So, for your first resume, maybe you focus on getting four bullets, five bullets maybe, on your most relevant experience, and you have a little less bullets on the other experiences that you have. That way, from the arm length test, when you hold your resume out, the first place your eye is going to go is to that most related experience. This is a great question, and this is something that comes up a lot. Let's build this around an example. So let's say you were a student worker, and you worked the entire four years of your undergraduate career at a university bookstore. Let's say that your sophomore and junior years you had really great internships in the field you're applying to, but you didn't do anything your senior year. So if you built your resume as we said you should in reverse chronological order starting with the most recent even and working yourself back. Then you're going to bury your related internships underneath of that bookstore work. And I'm not down playing the bookstore work, but I'm saying if you're tying to call attention to your experiences that were related you do want to pull those out somehow. Unfortunately you can't just break the rules and put them above the bookstore even though you just feel like they're more relevant. What would be a better idea is making a different section entirely and then putting that section above the work experience section. So let's take this example a step further and say those internships were in the field of business. So then you could create a section that is titled business experience or business internships. And then you can put those two internships there and then below that or somewhere further down the resume you'll have your other work experience section where you have your four years of experience at the university bookstore. So, the moral of the story is when you're in a situation where you've got multiple things in one section and you're trying to get one on the top. Instead of just breaking the reverse chronological rules, the best thing to do is consider a different section you might be able to tuck that into to get it higher on your page. We'll start with education history cause that's a little bit easier over an answer. For education history, once you enter your sophomore year or your second year of university or college, it's time to start thinking about letting go of some of the high school related experiences. So that includes where your high school might be indicated in your education section of your resume. In terms of work history, that's a little bit more complicated of an answer. It largely is going to depend on what type of work experience it was, how related is it, because the relevance of the work experience towards what you want to do puts a role in should I keep this or should I not. In terms of work history, just consider that the related experiences should probably stay. Anything that's not as related, so maybe the part time job hat you did while you were in high school or even a part time job that you worked on campus, that's going to be a very small portion of your resume. And as you start to accrue more and more related experiences toward what you want to do, your work history is probably going to start to slowly fall off of your resume. So as far as how far back you should go for your work history, for your first draft just go all the way back, there's no harm in that. But then you will realize right away that some of those experiences just aren't going to fit, or they don't have a place there anymore. So, that will kind of help you make your own decision as far a how far back you should go on your work history. [BLANK AUDIO] So the answer to this question is we pretty much default to the golden rule of resumes, which is anything that goes on a resume is fair game to be asked more questions about. So if whatever reasons led you to leave that organization or that company and you weren't on good terms, if you have that on your resume, be prepared that you might have to talk about that a little bit. Because it's on your resume, it's fair game for recruiter or a potential employer to ask you more questions about. So if you're comfortable explaining what all of that was about, feel free to leave it on. If you feel like you would rather not get into explaining what the terms were that led to that. It might be worth considering leaving it off, as long as you can have other experiences that can help fill that page. So there are some words that employers might view as a little bit cliched, but it's usually less about the word itself and more about where they find it on your resume. For example, if you chose to include a skill section on your resume and in that skill section you included words like trustworthy, dynamic, critical problem solver, good communicator. Those are good words, those are good skills. We've probably talked about them in modules as being good things. But the issue with throwing them in the skills section is you're just making these empty claims that these are skills I have. You could have grabbed a book of good words and just started writing good words in there. You need to consider the employer's going to want to see how have you done those things. How have you shown that you are dynamic. How have you shown that you have critical problem solving. How do you know that you're a good communicator. So if you find that you have a skills section, or you have those words on your resume, make sure that you're not just throwing them out there, but instead showing the employer how you've used those before. Demonstrating your mastery of that skill, or demonstrating your competence in that area so that the employer can see the transferable nature of how, okay, so you did that at that employer, you can do that at my place, too. Your resume should not include a photograph. Internationally there is some differences here. Different countries it's much more acceptable and often even required to have a photograph with your resume or to have a lot of personal identifying information in terms of marital status and date of birth and those sorts of things. For your standard North American job search, you do not need a photograph on your resume, you do not need to include your marital status, and you do not need to include your date of birth.
