Question:
As an EE who is sick and tired of his dead-end job which uses about 0.1% of
the knowledage gained after spending 6 years at college (now at university),
I have decided to leave and I am looking for another job. (being passed over
for promotion three times might also have something to do with this!)
Does anyone have any advise on the best layout of a CV for an EE? I
appreciate that there can be no "set" CV, as everyone is different and
unique in background. But I am looking for pointers in layout and example
career statements (A hard thing to do!).
is that right A different document is needed for certain professional
situations such as a professor, a consultant, a doctor or an
attorney. Resume Example ?
Answer:
A resume submitted to an employment agency is "keyword intense".
It is little more than a list of keywords that will trigger a
resume to be pulled when a word search is done. Format, size,
etc. mean little and in fact attempts to be sophisticated may be
detrimental.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is a paper document which
will be submitted with an application for a specific job
opening. The most important aspect of that document is
formatting. It must stand out in a stack of similar documents
just enough so reviewers pull it first and read it more
thoroughly. There should be *nothing* annoying in the
formatting, and rarely should it ever be more, or less, than
exactly 2 pages long.
A different document is needed for certain professional
situations such as a professor, a consultant, a doctor or an
attorney. In cases where every credential and every
professional reference is required, there is no limit to the
size of the document (it might list every certificate, every
association, and every publication over a 30 year period!), and
formatting is secondary.
Another document similar to the above is also not really used in
an employment application situation, but more for record keeping
within a company and might be called a "skills inventory" or
something similar. A resume on file that lists the experience,
qualifications, and preferences of an existing employee is also
less concerned with format or size and more with specific
detail. In some companies this may also approach the "keyword"
nature of the first example.
And last but not least is a resume intended as a quick and
handy reference to be distributed to associates, but not as part
of a formal application for employment. Such a document is
a relaxed version of all of the above, and generally none of
the rules need be pedantically followed.
Generally when people discuss size and formatting of a resume
they are referring to a paper document to be submitted with an
application. (And a gross error is associating that discussion
with the keyword list submitted to an agency.) Such documents
should *not* be done with a typical word processor, and are best
formatted and *typeset* by a professional resume writer! Little
things like subtle and very conservative use of color and fonts
are important. Typesetting differs from word processing in
easily allowing micro adjustments to the location of characters
such as parenthesis, slashes, dashes, and adjustment of spacing
or character sizes. The layout of the document should attract a
reviewer's attention to it, and the formatting should avoid even
annoyances so subtle that the reviewer is not conscious of being
affected. For example, line lengths too long, word spacing too
tight, dashes that do not line up with the mid-points on letters
like 3 and 8, parens too high when the letters have extenders or
two low if they don't, and many other things that literally
require going over the document with a magnifying glass! And
not so noticeable things like adjusting the spacing between lines
to make a two page resume *precisely* two pages long (the second
page should not be 1 inch shorter than the first page).
