photo credit: krispdk

Education

This is a tricky part of your resume, and you can’t leave it off. If you’re caught in a situation where you suspect that you’re being passed over as too old/young, think about taking the years off your resume regarding when you graduated, or highlighting more recent education.

If this is the area where you’re strong, expand.

Not necessarily your GPA, but if you got honors, list them. Yes, no one cares once you graduate what your GPA was, but a quick blurb about how sharp you are can’t hurt you. I once turned a passing conversation about working a full time job, and carrying 20 credits at the same time into a job offer.

Phrase it right and it can’t hurt you.

If this is the area where you’re weak, take some online classes or certifications and add them on your resume in this area. Make sure they’re directly related to what you’re going to be doing, and that if your industry doesn’t accept them, that they teach you marketable skills you can be quizzed on.

Employers themselves are often more interested in whether you can do the job than the HR department is in your on-paper qualifications.

If you’re really caught out there with no usable education, check local universities and community colleges for whether you can get credits for some of their free courses online and offline. iTunes U gives you video access to hundreds of courses for free at dozens of top universities.

There are some situations where you can sign up with a community college and either “test out” of taking courses or transfer in credits from courses you’ve taken at other schools, whether they’re free or not. Some universities give you credit for life experience, or allow you to get the bulk of your degree training online.

Especially for technical certifications, you may also be able to find self-paced training online inexpensively and only need to spring for the fee.

If it actually helped you learn the skills you need, it may suffice. Otherwise, keep the area brief and to the point and emphasize other strong points.

See also Listing Education: Free Online Resume Tips & Advice and Learn That’s ’s Certification section. Once again, I’m not a resume expert or job hunting guru. This is all based on my experiences from working in HR, and as a person who hires people to work for me. You’re taking my advice at your own risk, so please do your due diligence - that’s why I’m including links for further study.

Next time, we’ll talk about the Responsibilities section.

photo credit: triplezero

I’m going to attempt to keep this part brief because I’m tired. If you have questions - well, that’s what the comment form is for, love. :)

Here’s the problem with making a Killer Resume.

You want to get more experience, but first, you need more experience. You need to get more references, but first you need to get more references. You want a better job, but first you have to have a better job. It’s a catch-22 and it’s not pretty.

If you’re youngish, you’re too young. If you’re middle aged, you’re too old. If you’ve been self employed, they wonder if you’re unemployable. If you’ve been on a break from work they think you’re out of touch.

Everyone has some type of resume flaw, unless they’re happily employed. Such is the catch- 22. So you have to get creative.

By “get creative”, I don’t mean “lie”. I mean,

1- Jazz up the part of your education, work history, affiliations, skills or referrals that pop, and
2- de-emphasize those that don’t. And when you can,
3- think more expansively about listing information about yourself.

Over the next few days we’ll break these down into five basic areas and I’ll give you some quick tips.

Before we go on, let me say this: I’m not any type of career expert. I’ve just always been able to get a career-type job in two weeks or less back when I worked a day job. Every year or so I go out interviewing just to keep my skills sharp.

Though I have no intention of ever working for someone else in a traditional job ever again, knowing how what’s happening on the other side of the desk helps greatly. Plus, hey, you never know.

I did work two jobs in which I was required to be an intimate part of the job applicant process, one as a decision maker, and one as the person who decided whose resume went in the trash and whose got considered for interviewing. So I have some experience but not enough to make me a guru. I’ll provide links to people and sites who can give you some more official tips throughout each article.

We’ll start with the education part when we come back.

Just so you know, when I was a suck up? All day long I did not biddy-biddy-bum. That’s what I did when I was a wealthy man.

But now I’m a woman who is still in the process of becoming wealthy. And once I was a woman who had a day job and dreamed of going elsewhere. And when I did have a day job this is how I made the most of it.

I got my work done early and did my own thing with the rest of the day.

Be careful though, this can be dangerous. Even if your boss gives you permission to do non-company work on company time when you’re done with your regular work load, you have to think about how this makes you look. Your peers and their bosses might not like it. So you will have to overlap that with step number two.

I perfected the art of looking busy.

This is best achieved by actually being busy, though not necessarily at the work you’d be doing if it weren’t already done. The trick is to make it look like you’re still doing something your peers or your bosses bosses will think is important. My preference was to carry a clipboard or a stack of papers around and walk briskly. Nod/smile but don’t make eye contact, walk like you’re on your way somewhere. You can also do this with your computer, but get a privacy screen. Nosy people are the enemy.

I took advantage of the training I needed to get me to the next level.

At one place I worked we had $4000 of training every six months for free, we didn’t even have to do that whole reimbursement thing. And you could take this training on company time. So i found what I was interested in and when I got bored, I would train for new things. Sometimes, I’d take a pen and pad out and be writing my novel at my desk after studying. (This was always after I was done with my work - the idea is not to rob the company, just to time shift.) Everyone knew I was taking extra training so they’d assume I was studying. I always helped out when asked though.

I took every break allowed to me under the law, away from my desk.

The breaks are there for a reason. If you’re going to survive working for others, especially at a job you hate, you need to take those breaks. With people you enjoy hanging with if possible. Bonus: sometimes going out to stare at trees helps you relax enough to solve a problem.

I went out to lunch.

Even when I was saving money by bringing my own lunch, I would eat it at the park, or go to a cafe and buy a small drink to have with it. If I was close enough I’d actually go home. That brief change of scenery at lunch does more for you than that extra hour you may be able to get by working through lunch at your desk.

I mingled with higher-ups in other departments.

The managers and supervisors in your department think you want their job. And maybe they’re right. Or they don’t want to be partial if you ever need to be disciplined or considered for promotion. In other departments, or neighboring companies, they’re going to be more relaxed and willing to treat you as a peer. And later when you need references, boom. This worked like a charm when I was in tech support. To get new/better jobs, I’d get referrals from heads of departments whose computer issues I had fixed, or get the head of hardware instead of the head of the help desk. We were friends, so I could get them to say anything (truthful) I wanted them to, plus I’d be side-stepping the politics of my own department.

I spoke to a C level executive in a casual fashion, once a week.

Everyone is scared of the people with the most authority. Having been (and currently being) the person in the company with the most authority, let me tell you, people in authoritative positions who actually want to make things better hate that. (People on ego trips don’t but who wants to befriend them?)

It’s the same way most celebrities find it refreshing to meet someone who treats them like a peer and a regular person. People are afraid of them, so they lie to them, they have to work harder to get good information to make changes. Approach them, befriend them, inform them. Just be careful not to waste their time.

I gave myself a small reward at the end of every work day.

To keep from going crazy, I really had to program myself, Pavolonian style, to be happy about where I was. That included gifts to myself for a job well done.

I plotted my exit in my down time.

More often than not, an opportunity to get to where you want to go is here and gone before you know it. You have to know as much as possible about how to handle the situation before it comes up. It gives you an edge over the next guy, and gives you something to daydream about when someone starts droning on about TPS reports

I solved problems no one else wanted to touch.

Now this mights seem like it would get you further entrenched in the organization, or stuck in your position. Indispensable people don’t get promoted because they’re too valuable to the position they are in. But. When you solve an issue that’s related to uncollected revenue, you are the star of the show suddenly. No, you probably won’t get a kickback for that, but it makes a great conversation point with that C-level exec you just made friends with.

How do you know I’m an expert? I’m not on this topic, actually - this post is based on my personal experiences.

But you can Google me, or read my site on traffic generation and decide for yourself. Test everything - with at least logic.

If someone who was brand new to generating traffic asked me for an uncomplicated plan for getting targeted visitors to their site, I’d tell them to focus on 6 things, in this order;

1. Advertising - on search engines, in ezines, on blogs
2. Blogging and RSS - create a blog, create a feed/podcast, promote it, participate in neighboring blog communities
3. Expertise Marketing - write an article, let other people publish it in exchange for a link back, do webinars, teleseminars, interviews.
4. Joint Ventures - partner with another individual or company for mutual benefit and/or publicity
5. Affiliates or Referrals - get other people to sell your products and let them worry about how to generate traffic, get additional visitors from existing visitors/customers/clients
6. Social Media - bookmarking, news sites, document sharing, networking online, video sharing

Now, that’s not in order of importance, that’s in order of what newbies can do to get up and running fast.

It’s not impossible to do a joint venture as a newbie, but it’s harder when you don’t know people.

It’s not impossible to launch your product with an affiliate army, and with industries like timeshare resales or wholesale airline/cruise tickets, it’s not necessarily practical. And despite what all the $97 course sales letters say, getting social media traffic in your first 24 - 48 hours is not easy. It may be simple, but it’s a lot of hard work to get traffic from it that quickly.

But a blog you can start in a day and your web host may have an automatic installation of it for you. If you’re not technical, you can also go with domain mapping and a hosted service. If you’re tagging, and commenting, and you pick the right topic, you could get a trickle of people in your first day. Same with RSS - and you don’t necessarily have to create new content.

The process doesn’t have to be complicated. The newer ways of getting visitors, like blogging, podcasting, and getting on the first page of Digg are all well and good. but throw some of the foundational techniques in there. Those traditional methods still work.

How do you know I’m an expert? You don’t. But you can Google me, or read my site on traffic generation and decide for yourself. Test everything - with at least logic.

I watched a great movie last night, with a very unexpected twist. It’s a Guy Ritchie film called Revolver, and is kind of controversial. If you’re the type of person who is into both improving your mind and action pictures, it’s for you. IF you prefer not to think during your entertainment, skip it.

Without giving away the film, it has definitely given me a revelation about Social Media, and helped me realize with additional clarity what is wrong with the way most people approach it.

For the beginners, let me just quickly say how we’re framing the discussion. For our purposes, social media refers to media that includes some sort of interactive element which allows you to more easily share resources with a person you know. That would include blogs, social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, social voting sites like Mixx, embeddable video like you might find at YouTube, or embeddable, shareable media channels like you can create at kyte.tv.

Most of the time, people look at social media and think of how it can benefit them. Which is fine - what’s the point of doing things that don’t benefit us? The problem is, if you take that mindset into social media promotion, you’re going to miss out on the most powerful aspect of it.

Yes, you can get massive traffic from your site being on the front page of Propeller.

But you can also make great connections by sharing useful information that isn’t about your site or any site you’re affiliated with. Through those connections you may find a person who runs a community of people who have a pressing yearning for your products or services that don’t compete with the owner’s offerings. And that could bring you massive, targeted traffic from a population that’s more willing to buy, click or subscribe. Or you might meet the person who introduces you to someone who is best friends with the person who hires your company for the biggest project you’ve ever done.

My personal favorite use of social media is to connect with people I never would dream of being able to correspond with through email. You may not have heard of Bob Doyle but I just about idolize him - he makes a really touchy-feely subject very practical. He created a product in the late 90s that gave me part of my life back. And I found the path to his latest product by shyly connecting to him through a social networking site.

Small world.

You don’t have to be completely altrustic either. Just include the perspective of the recipient in your promotional ideas so they can go farther. If you have an account where you only submit your own links or the links of people you are affiliated with, think about how that looks to people who come across your account information. Would YOU befriend you? Which is important, because you’re going to need those connections to get your submissions popular.

Or say that you’re starting a campaign to get a bunch of bloggers to talk about you to their audience. The first thing you’re going to have to think Very hard about is: why would they do this for me?

Here’s a hint: I’m not necessarily talking about incentives…

For the next week, think of social media in a different way. Each day, instead of thinking, how can I get more links out of this, and how can I build more traffic to my site, approach it from this standpoint: How can I meet the best people for my professional life? And what can I do for THEM?

It could be that you can write them a private testimonial. Maybe you noticed a problem on their site no one is fixing. Perhaps you have access to a secret river of incredible resources that you can share with them and their audience. You could comment on their blog post. You could submit a really good post of theirs to Mixx. You could email one friend, just one, and tell them about the site.

For just a week, focus on the Social in social media. Track what you’re doing and in a month, compare Those results with what you have now. I bet you’ll be incredibly and pleasantly surprised.