How to highlight the most essential things in the resume

Resume

When it comes to resume writing, it is of crucial importance to highlight the most crucial parts of the resume.

While some claim that the entire resume should look polished, you should still remember that highlighting is the most useful tool for your resume to stand out among other applicants. If you were looking for some pieces of advice on how to do that properly, don’t miss a chance to use our recommendations, which were compiled as the result of our engagement in the field of resume writing, as follows.

Skills and competencies

It is often believed that skills and competencies are somewhat less important in the resume section than the sections regarding work experience and formal education. In reality, the modern competitive business world has just gone crazy with all those sub-sections of a single job. Just take a UX researcher as an example of the role that can have sharply contrasting responsibilities and usual activities in two different activities. The same can be applied to technical writers, software engineers, and manual testers.

So, it seems obvious that skills and competencies should stand out the most in your resume. Just consider emphasizing your strengths in your industry, at the same time, mapping out the junior skills in the cross-disciplinary fields. This is just the perfect moment to include the information about all those certifications, diplomas, internships, training, and so on and so forth. As long as you stay somewhat close to the skills that are relevant in your industry by intentionally highlighting them, your resume will show the real you on the labor market!

Yes, work experience matters (in terms of wording)

Don’t get us wrong, skills and competencies are crucial and should be prioritized in any type of resume. But don’t forget that a wide range of soft skills that are relevant in the modern labor market still require some narrow specialization. That means that you should do your best in describing your skills and strong sides from the perspective of your former experiences and the ways how you actually obtained those skills. It is not the time to be modest.

In that sense, just try using some empirical data from your former occupations, where you increased/boosted/optimized/enhanced some processes one way or another. You will surely make your resume more convincing and persuasive for the employers and recruiters of the companies that were once your dream workplaces.

Our last recommendation is to be concise in terms of depicting your work experience. We all did numerous things in our jobs, yet staying close to your main specialization should matter the most. In simple words, don’t emphasize being time-efficient and effective as your strong sides because these things better describe some standalone application but not you, personally.

Good-old education

Even though the role of academics is hugely criticized by lots of people, its impact is actually stronger than ever. We are not going to talk here about highlighting that you have graduated from one of the most prestigious London colleges.

Regardless of where you actually attained your education, it still might be useful for the recruiters to see what activities you were engaged in. Sometimes, participation in some NGO work or even the youth activities might be the key for organizations that want to hire a specialist with experience in working with certain target audiences.

You should surely mention all the student activities that really matter, especially if they are closely related to your future work. We find this tip to be highly influential for those who are about to land their first full-time job.

Graduates from the educational affiliations are most likely to do their best in presenting their student activities from the brightest perspective instead of just choosing the easy road and hire resume writers instead of writing one by themselves. That means that it is strongly advisable to make the most of your former non-commercial experience and do your best in finding some correlations that might be convincing for the employers in your discipline.

In conclusion

We all perfectly know that writing a flawless resume can be tough, especially if the work experience or skills sections are hard to make more descriptive. Keeping that in mind, you can even try adding external links to your online resume by attaching the case studies or assessment results from your last job or study-related courses.

The real results or the clear picture of how your skills can be applied to a particular position are always better than ordinary chants about you being the best and the most ambitious person ever. Once you set up on the right track, the results wouldn’t wait long to shine bright. We can only wish you to follow our pieces of advice and land that long-anticipated executive job by highlighting all the mentioned above parameters. Good luck!

Photo by Helloquence on Unsplash