Thinking about brushing up your resume? Read this first.
All accomplishment-based resumes should contain:
- Contact information
- Objective Statement
- Specific skills
- Measurable achievements and accomplishments
- Employment history
- Educational background
Communicating well-defined and transferrable accomplishments is where you have the chance to set yourself apart. Writing down your professional accomplishments becomes the answer to, ‘Tell me a few good things you’ve done that would make me want to hire you.’
Each of your professional accomplishments should consist of four parts:
- A description of the event
- What made it important
- What you did to make it happen
- The measurable results
Examples:
Created a volunteer group to organize a viable thrift store operation. Scheduled a team of volunteers to better organize donation intake, sorting, pricing, and staging of merchandise for resale. This initiative ensured consistent workflow among 15 trained volunteers and contributed $6,000.00 quarterly to support a variety of beneficial community projects.
Recommended process and updated procedures for quarterly review of a document control database. Discovered omissions and corrected serious duplication errors in original database, thru improving the accuracy and efficiency of the database. As a result, the company improved its customer service reporting capability by 100%.
Remember:
Avoid vague or windy statements such as “resulted in a large savings of time and money,” or “led to increased sales.” If you can claim that sales increased, you must estimate the amount of the increase and make sure it is reasonably accurate and could bear investigation. Sometimes there is simply no way to put a figure on your results. But you can still demonstrate the value of your work to the employer:
Example:
Served as the Treasurer for the local school’s Parent-Teacher Advisory Board. Established a formal accounting system for expenditure records and created a new process for tracking petty cash and receipts. This effort improved the integrity and efficiency of the bookkeeping function and led to 100% accuracy in reconciliation of funds.
Be sure to include as many specific action verbs, such as the ones listed below, in your statements. This will make your writing more descriptive and efficient.
Action verbs:
achieved analyzed built
conducted created designated
established finalized increased
motivated negotiated obtained
resolved tested trained
wrote