If I knew all the words

Seth Godin once posed the question:
“Are you better at what you do than you were a month or two ago?”
I find this an intriguing questions because as I had found over the past year I was not improving my skills, I was simply trying to learn the ropes.
What I’ve found is that you can do both at the same time. You will never advance in your job or even land the job you’re striving for unless you constantly work at improving your skills.

Here are a few thing to help get you started:
1. Make a list of your Skills you want to improve- This is not only a good place to start, but this is also a good thing to know because you will be asked the question “what are your weaknesses?”  in an interview, or you will be asked to improve on your weaknesses for a development goal. But don’t just pick something easy, find weaknesses/skill that you can truly achieve, but will also give you a challenge.

2. Brain storm – Brain storm a list of rescources that will help you turn your weak skills into strengths. Maybe it’s keeping up with your blog to enhance your writing skills, or taking online classes at Linda.com. But find ways to achieve your goals.

3. Schedule time to work on your skills – If you don’t actually take the time to asses your skills  and work on them, you will never move forward. You can increase the time you put out a project, but if your skill that needs improvement is your grammar, then take the time to re-read your project before you turn it in.

4. Take your time- If you’ve already admitted to yourself that your skills need some improvement, then take your time to actually work toward improvement. Take an extra five minutes to asses your work and make sure you’ve completed it to the best of your ability.

5. Save Compliments - If you or your co-works or professors have noticed an improvement in your skills and have commented on it, save the compliment. It helps to look back at encouraging works to keep your momentum going in the future. Also, if it comes down to a promotion, you have proof that you’re moving forward and working hard to improve.

Take some time to improve your skills in the new year.

I’ve been at it again, updating my resume. And it is just around the corner for the senior PR students at UO, who are wrapping up their campaigns and focusing on their portfolio reviews. I remember one thing I struggled with the most was my resume. Thanks to the career building class taught by Bill Morill and the Career Center at UO, they taught me a lot about writing my resume. But I’ve learned more from playing around with it, looking at others, and having people look over mine as well.

Although this class was great in introducing me to the descriptive verbs to describe the tasks I’d accomplished, it also closed my mind about the format of my resume. There are so many different ways you can format your resume there is no wrong way.

So here is some advice I wish someone told me:

1. Keep your Resume to one page, and one page only: After 10 years of experience you are allowed a second page! But no one is going to read your resume if it is longer than one page. This helps you to be concise and use descriptive words to describe what you’ve accomplished.

2. Your visual presentation of your resume says a lot about you. Spice up your resume. Add some fun fonts and colors (just make sure it’s legible) and even print it on a nice thick resume paper. It will set your resume out from all the others, and the employer will know you put in extra effort to make it enjoyable to look at.  Note: Do NOT, I repeat DO NOT use a Word Template. SO boring. If I were looking at your resume and you used a plain word template it just lost about ten points!

3. If you got the skills, flaunt them. Highlight an unusual skill you poses. It doesn’t have to be that unusual, but for instance Social Media is a great skill to highlight as much as possible in your resume. So many employers these days are looking for new talent that hold that skill set. So don’t be shy.

4. Be Adventurous. Re-format your resume multiple times. I was so stuck in my way of having my resume cut and clear and to the point. But, recently decided to take a chance and write a short profile section explaining some of my skills, and I think it will help the employer know me that much more. By writing my skills out in sentences this freed up more space for bullets under my experience section.

5. Put another set of Eye balls on it. I’ve already had 3 different people look at my resume this past week, and have another person tomorrow. Be open to suggestions, fresh eyes come with fresh ideas.

If you have any other tips for writing resume please comment! I know there are plenty more

The University of Oregon’s Career Center provides this PDF packet on how to write good cover letters and Resume’s, it is a great resource and you can download it here. Page 3 has a great list of verbs to use when describing your skills!

Happy Resume writing and I’m more than happy to be another set of eyes! Good luck!