Where to Begin?
Titan Résumé Builder
Whether you are building your first résumé, or updating a previous résumé, the Titan Résumé Builder is a great tool to begin building your professional résumé. The objective of the Titan Résumé Builder is to help CSUF students produce higher quality résumés on a 24/7 basis, on- or off-campus through their student portals.
Titan Résumé Builder is easy to use with examples tuned to majors and fields of study. The Titan Résumé Builder allows students to build, manage, and control multiple résumés. Résumés are offered as Microsoft Word documents and/or web pages, adding flexibility and enhancing capabilities. To access the Titan Résumé Builder visit the Career Center's homepage at www.fullerton.edu/career.
Begin with the Target Job
As your job search becomes more immediate and competitive, you will need to focus carefully on what employers are looking for and organize your résumé around the keywords in the target job description. A good idea is to circle keywords in the job listing that describe required and desired Education, Skills and Experience. Make it easy for the employer to find your qualifications by using the categories and keywords that the employer uses. Evaluate your current résumé to see whether it mirrors the job description. If not, you will want to reorganize, re-emphasize, and reconfigure your résumé material.
For instance, you could be majoring in a technical area, working for a software house with an expectation to advance your career as a programmer. Your résumé would showcase the following.
- Coursework in mathematics, logic, physics, and computer systems
- Software languages and applications, as well as hardware platforms
- Projects you have worked on and solutions you created
- Team Projects and your role within the team
This could be described as building your résumé from the top down, by focusing your résumé in categories that mirror the job requirements. The more experience you gain and the more competitive the positions you target, the more important it will be for you to build your résumé by beginning with the job description.
Know Your Industry, Your Field, and Your Competition
Writing a competitive résumé requires you to know about current issues and trends in your chosen profession. You will want to have a background in the following.
- client/customer profiles
- prevailing theories, methodologies, and tools of the trade
- industry leaders and competitors
- challenges, structural shifts, and other trends creating change
- industry terminology, verbiage, and lingo