5 Résumé Tips for College Seniors

You are just months away from graduating college and your mind is turning to life after school. Unless you are planning to pursue your master’s degree, you will soon be entering the workforce or at least contending for a new job. Before you can get to that step you need to craft your résumé or what is sometimes known as a curriculum vitae. Read on for some helpful tips on how any college senior can get a winning résumé written without too much of a tussle.

Get started now. You are in the final year of your undergraduate studies. Begin right now to formulate your first post-college resume. Don’t worry about the details just yet, but do plan to set aside time right away to begin your resume.

1. Your Personal Information.
At the top of your CV, you will need to list your full name. Avoid nicknames; instead use your full legal name such as: Anne Marie Stanley-Brown. On the second line you will list your mailing address followed by your contact phone numbers including your cell phone and landline. Lastly, on the third line, share your email address and, if appropriate, your website address. Avoid silly email addresses that lack professionalism such as sexylady24@mailme.com. 

2. Your Qualifications.
Your work history and other experience is limited at this point, but you do possess certain qualifications that most any potential employer would like to know about. Use this in place of an objectives statement, clearly outlining your skills and what you bring to any potential employer. Include your hard and soft skills such as MySql proficiency and customer relations capabilities. You should easily be able to identify at least five to six qualifying points and list these here.

3. Educational Background.
At this point, you will need to emphasize your educational background. Don’t worry about your job experience — employers know that you are just finishing up college and that you do not have many years of experience under your belt. Here, you need to list your major, your expected degree, your college, its location and your date of graduation. You will need to explain to the reader what courses you took, special assignments completed, overseas studies conducted and your academic achievements. Yes, conclude this section with your grade point average.

4. Related Employment.
Okay, working as a burger flipper at McDonald’s may seem totally unrelated, but then there are so many parts of that job that can be useful, you will want to give "Mickey D" his just desserts. Consider every aspect of your job — you not only made food to order, but you liaised with customers, worked with a team, carried out orders from a manager and handled money. You need to think of a way to present your many and disparate job opportunities in such a way to demonstrate how these jobs connect to the one you want.

If your employment background is thin in experience, but thick on volunteerism, use the same approach. That 12-week summer church mission assignment in South Africa helped you gain some skills you might otherwise have missed. Plus, it gave you international and inter-cultural experience, huge pluses in most any global employer’s eyes.

5. Scan Those Ads.
Newspaper ads have basically disappeared, replaced by online ads posted to Indeed, Career Builder, Hotjobs, Monster and other job sites. Likely, you have an idea of what employers are on your "desired list" of companies, therefore head over to each company’s website and peruse the careers section. While there you will take note of jobs that you may be qualified for. Study these jobs and learn what keywords are mentioned. You will need to incorporate these words into your CV as most employers will collect and scan your information first. Keywords help easily identify who you are and what you do.

Résumé Essentials

If you find yourself having much difficulty crafting a résumé, your college and career office is available to help out. Make an appointment or attend one of many seminars that will be held. Your college advisor may be able to assist you too. In any case, do not put this step off as you will soon be sending your CV out to employers that have requested copies from you.

Author Information
Lisa Tomkinson writes about pre employment screening among the many business and recruiting topics she covers for CV Inisght.