As a new graduate, you may be missing an important aspect of a resume— relevant skills and work experience. When writing your resume, therefore, you’ll need to concentrate on showcasing your transferable skills rather than your work history.
If you haven’t already done so, the first and perhaps most important step in writing your resume is choosing your career focus. Employers who read your resume want to see that you have skills that are relevant to the position you’re applying for, so you absolutely must do this before writing a resume.
The next step is identifying the skills and attributes that will be relevant to the positions you’re applying for. The easiest way of doing this is to look at job ads and find out what employers are looking for in terms of both practical experience and professional attributes.
Even if you have little or no work history, your college education has provided you with many skills that will be important in the workplace.
- Leadership skills
- Time management
- Written and verbal communication
- Problem-solving
- Analytical skills
- Computer skills
The key is showcasing your transferable skills—those skills you’ve gained at college that you can bring to the workplace.
The same principle applies for any jobs or internships you may have had during your college years. Any transferable skills you gained can be added to your resume, even if the job itself was not directly relevant to the positions you’re interested in now.
Don’t overlook the value of unpaid work experience—anything and everything counts, as long as the skills you list are transferable, and relevant to the type of job you’re seeking. This can include volunteer work, fraternity, sorority and campus club positions as well as internships.
As a new graduate your big selling point is usually your education—this means you can include a more extensive education section than you might on a standard resume for a more experienced job seeker. Including a high GPA adds value to your qualification and you can also add a summary of completed courses.
Choosing a format for your resume is the final step before you start writing. If your relevant work experience is limited, a hybrid resume format that includes elements of both chronological and functional formats is best. This allows you to highlight your transferable skills and downplay your limited professional experience.
For a resume example, you can view our Free Entry Level Resume Example.
Also, please review our Resume Writing section for resume examples, tips and tools. Need inspiration? View our free sample resumes or get started using a free online resume builder.
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Excellent. I would like to visit this again and again because of the nice tips.
As a recent graduate who worked at his College’s Career Services Office as a resume consultant I can say that this advice is spot on. Good work.
I also wanted to add that I think the combination of the functional and chronological resume is the best for recent graduates. I think that functional resumes usually scream “I have no experience and I’m desperate for a job.” When using the combination format, however, you present yourself in a way more in line with traditional chronological resumes but the focus would be on your transferable skills. When working with students during a resume consultation I often told them to group their work experience into categories to better highlight the transferable skills. For example if a position in medicine was looking for a candidate who had clinical observation and research experience I would change the experience header to read “clinical experience,” and then list underneath it in chronological order any volunteer or internship experience you have with clinical observations. The next header you would use is “research experience,” and you would list your research experience in the same way as the clinical experience. By grouping experience in this hybrid way the candidate highlights the transferable skills through his or her limited experience (which is listed in chrono-order for each experience sub-section). Thanks for the great post and keep up the great content. – John
It seems like creating a resume for a grad is probably one of the hardest things to do. You usually don’t want to extremely high light education but on the flip side, with no education there or work experience, you just look like a poor candidate. A balance, if achievable, would be ideal.