What is a resume?

Do I need a resume?

Not being aware of how the professional world operates is absolutely fine if you are in the first year of your graduation, but the sooner you understand a few basic aspects of navigating the job market will do you good. Your professional life starts with a document called Resume, which is nothing but a summary of all your credentials. Guess what! Everyone needs one.

If you are in college, you have definitely heard from your friends or teaching staff about resume. If you haven’t heard yet, you will hear about resume before you graduate because there is no escaping the most principal document if you were going to be doing anything worthwhile with your degree.

Idea in Brief

Everyone needs a resume. There is no escaping this document. You would need to have your resume ready well before you start applying to jobs. When someone wants to know what your professional qualifications are – you send them a resume by email or whatsapp. When you ask your uncle or aunt to refer you in their network for a job, you would basically do that by sending them your resume. So, build your resume and keep it handy.

What is a resume?

A resume is a formal document that a job applicant creates to summarize their qualifications for a particular job. A resume is usually one or two pages. If you are a fresh graduate, your resume is usually one page. As you grow in your career, you would take on new positions and roles across various companies and industries and then naturally your resume will be longer than one page.

Resume is needed for all those that look for a job. It does not matter whether one is already holding a job or just starting to look out after graduation. Also, it does not matter whether one is a post graduate or a PhD or a Diploma Holder. Everyone needs a resume. A resume is what the job applicant would send to the employer by applying to the job on job portals.

You could come across a job opportunity through various channels, like your friends, relatives, college, alumni or job sites. Irrespective of the channel, you would need a resume ready to be shared. If you are sending your resume via email, you would just attach the resume to the email and send to whoever you want to send. If you are applying to jobs via job sites, you would submit the resume on the job site itself.

Resume misconceptions

If you are in college, you are going to hear a lot of mixed opinions about resumes ranging from what color to use, how long it should be, whether to have your picture on the resume, whether to put page number, etc. You will be surprised to see that there is no standard template and you can literally to whatever you want to do with your resume.

You can just have your name on a word document with your degree and marks, and call that a resume – that will be perfectly acceptable too, but it will be a big deviation from the norms so you would want to add a little bit more information.

The color of the fonts, number of pages, whether to have a picture on the resume is all up to you. You will not be wrong with whatever you do on your resume except for mistakes and inaccurate information. Things like spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, incomplete sections and lying are all not acceptable. As long as you take care of these mistakes, your resume is good.

How can you build your resume?

There are lots of free resources available these days for you to build your first resume. The easiest way would be to check a pre-filled resume for your degree and job you are looking for on our site 1minsresume.com. Simply search for the resume you need, download and edit essential sections like name, degree, college name, years of study and any specific skills you want to add.

Once you built your resume, check for spelling and grammatical mistakes because they are something you don’t want to have on your resume. Another way to make sure your resume is clean of any mistakes is you ask one of your friends to critically read it for you. You can return the favor by reading theirs.

Do not be misled by those that tell you that colorful and longer resumes are better. There is nothing farther from truth. The best resume template is situational, meaning what is best for one person need not be best for another. A tip that can do you good for the long professional career ahead of you is “simpler the better and less is more” when it comes to building resumes.

Keep your resume ready

It does not matter whether you are in the final year or the first year of your undergraduate degree. Always have your resume ready and updated at all times. You can create a simple reminder in your mobile phone’s reminder app to remind you to update your resume every three months – even if you are still in college. It is impossible to create a resume that is most up to date overnight; that is why it is important to keep your resume like a diary – a living document that you revisit every now and then and keep it current. Keep your resume ready because you never know when you will need it. Good luck!