Steps to build a resume

Have you ever wonder how easy it is to build a resume with just 5 steps and in less than half an hour? Today, the quick guide of building this powerful resume will be revealed here.

Step 1: Your personal details
Personal details in your resume should be at minimal. Insert details that you think would be important for employers to contact you ONLY. The reason behind is you can have more space in your resume to promote your skills and strength.

Photo:
Name:
Mobile number:
Tel No:
Email:
Address:

Step 2: Highest Education Background
Many jobseekers are reluctant to leave out their secondary school, primary school details and achievements. Employer will not judge your qualifications by knowing that you are coming from a school in Perak, or Pahang. Your UPSR/PMR/SPM results don’t bring much value to your resume because that was a very old history of yours compared to your GCPA (university’s result). Build this section on employer need-to-know basis only.

Step 3: Career Objective/Summary of Qualification
This is fairly important because employer get to know your key qualities at a glance. In this section, career objectives should be specific and simple. Objective like “Seeking a position to utilize my analytical skills and interpersonal skills” don’t mean anything to the employer. Some suggested objective/summary of qualification format:

“Seeking an engineering position possibly in the semiconductor field which requires strong circuit drawing skills and great failure analysis background.”

Key qualification:
- PCB layout designs - Result-oriented
- PSPICE/MATLAB - Cost estimation
- Research and development - RF device programming
- Exceptional IT knowledge - Writing test procedures
- Detailed-oriented - Presentation skills

Note that these are key technical qualifications and hands on experience mixed with your interpersonal strength to tell employer how different are you from the other candidates. These are strong personal threads that will invite employer’s interest.

Step 4: Awards and Certificates
Show off your awards in university such as dean’s list or contest and professional certificates like Cisco CCNA, Microsoft MCSE

Step 5: Employment History
This section will mainly focus on your responsibilities and achievements in each job employment. Fresh graduates are encouraged to highlight their industrial training or internship achievements here. Use “Action words” like “In charged of”, “Designed”, “Planned”, “and Organized” rather than “Responsibility includes”, “Drawing”, “Attending”, “Organizing”, “Require to build”

Quantify your achievements in numbers like:

“4% growth in new client database”, “Sales of RM5000”, “improving yield by 7%”, “reducing production cost by 10%”

“handled 20 cases of internal audit and tax calculation”, “programmed 3 major online purchasing websites with payment solution”

If you do not have key achievements, you can insert your experience gained; like:

“Hands on experience in machine installation, calibration”, “Professional training on UBS accounting and tax calculation”, “Master the programming test codes using Perl or C++”

Building this section using correct action words, quantifying your achievements, or relating your hands on experience will make you stand out among rest of the job seekers. Employers can’t wait to pick up that phone to call you for an interview.

For job seekers that did not undergo industrial training they can also insert below section into the resume:

1) Co-curricular activities (with achievements) and voluntary work
2) Final year research (in short)

Reference can be inserted but you must make sure that your reference has prepared to give you some positive remark. Else I would suggest inserting “References provided upon request” to make sure employer don’t call reference that is out-dated or can’t even recall who you are.

Practice make perfect. Always take the initiatives to improve and update your resume frequently.