EDITOR'S POST

What is the format of a chronological resume?

Q. What is the format of a chronological resume?

A. In the U.S., the recipients of resumes expect to see a tabulation of your education credentials and a record of your job history, the latter in reverse chronological order. Resumes listing accomplishments without dates are likely to get tossed. One disadvantage of this format is that significant experiences in your background will not be highlighted unless they are recent. If only some of your experience is relevant you can divide it into blocks: "Related Experience" and "Additional Experience," or "Industrial Experience" and "Academic Experience".

In all formats, put your name, postal address, phone number, and e-mail address on top, center. On a multi-page paper resume, put your name and page number on each subsequent page, in case they get separated.

Next, put a brief summary of your qualifications, areas of expertise, strengths, talents, and skills applicable to the kind of work you're seeking. The summary section can be customized for a specific employer. Don't use buzzwords like "self-motivated, goal-oriented, hands-on professional" -- anyone can characterize himself/herself this way.

Next, put a section called "Experience" or "Work experience". In this format, positions are listed in reverse chronological order.

Experience:

Dates    Company

         Title

         Description of what your duties and accomplishments.

Put the (total) dates of service in left hand margin for each company you have worked for. When you have held several jobs at one company, put a parenthesis after each position.

Stress your transferable skills and accomplishments over duties and responsibilities. (However, successful performance of duties is in itself an accomplishment.) Relate how your actions saved or made money, saved time, improved production or whatever value it had to the organization. If you had significant contributions or accomplishments, highlight them with bullets.

If you've had a lot of short-term positions, list only those in the last 10--15 years that are relevant to the work you seek. If, 20 years before, you were in a totally different industry, summarize.

Then list your college and post-graduate education:

Education:

Dates    School

         Degree, Major

         Description of classes and skills learned.

         Titles of master's thesis and doctoral dissertation.

List any recent coursework related to the position for which you're applying. Under some circumstances (particularly, a resume for an internship) it's appropriate to give more information about your coursework that may be important to the employer or show a special academic focus that is not obvious from your major. If you've won any academic honors (scholarships, Dean's List, election to honor societies, class standing etc.), list them as well. See Q-1.12 for the discussion of the grade point average.

Placing the education before the work experience tells the reader that you consider your education to be more impressive than your work experience (which may be appropriate for a recent graduate). Placing the education after the work experience will force the reader to look at your work experience before deciding to disqualify you because of the education.

Personal: Anything you have done on your own that you feel is a transferable skill -- HTML programming, e-mail usage, Perl programming, etc.

If applicable, list your professional affiliations, languages proficiencies (foreign or computer), publications, etc in separate sections.

Try to customize the resume and the cover letter for each company you're applying to. Emphasize products or customers or procedures that the target company is involved with. One way to do this is to first write a longer, all-inclusive resume, then, when you apply, cut on the details of no interest to this particular company.

In other countries, resumes sometimes include photographs, date of birth, height, weight, ethnicity, marital status, religion, and handwriting samples; names, ages, and occupations of family members; etc. All this should be left off the resume in the U.S.

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