Advancing your career is more than just building your resume. You can add all manner of skills and still struggle at your job, at getting a promotion, and even being satisfied with your work. Likewise, there are a few reasons why technologists expand their skills. It is not always just a way to add a new item to the CV. In a similar sense, there are many things you can do beyond skills to look better to prospective employers.
A Methodical Process For Building Your Resume
Before you update (or upgrade) your resume, the first thing to consider is where you want to be. That includes where you see yourself in six months and six years. Sometimes, you can quickly move by adding a rare skill to your toolbox. On the other hand, that rare skill can get you pigeonholed and stuck in a job too good to leave. I always find a retrospective is good before embarking on a resume cleanup.
Consider your previous months or years at work and list the things that brought joy and pain. Be honest and open with yourself during this process. There may be things you hate to do, but they feel critical to your success. While that may be true, it is always worth asking the question. The question? What would life be like if I never had to deal with this again? Yes, that includes dealing with your boss or that annoying co-worker.
Make A Good Start
This pro and con approach to your daily grind is always valuable, but even more so at the beginning of your career. You are still feeling your way through what you like, dislike, and what is a part of the job, no matter what. The good news is that almost nothing falls into that last category. Therefore, build your career roadmap and make sure your resume aligns with that. It is a typical rookie mistake to load up the outline and then worry about the path it creates later. That can direct you right into a trap.
Choose Milestones
Once you have a good idea of what you want, plotting the best course to achieve it is time. This is a gap analysis where needed skills or experience are identified. These are then turned into milestones. They will initially have no priority or order for them. However, the next step is to add those details. We often take logical (and realistic) paths to master a skill or family of talents.
Those steps will start as gaps in your resume that you want to fill. They can be filled through training and education or experience. That brings us to our objective. There will be some skills that we can pursue outside of our daily schedule and some that we can make a part of our professional growth in our day job. We want to keep both of these in mind when building our resume.
Build On A Strong Foundation
We all start somewhere. That is how you properly plan your roadmap and select the best skills to build your resume. Go for the more general-purpose skills that can be used to win a “stepping stone” position where you can make experience to match your skills. Those steps will open the doors for your next options and perfect career path.
Next Steps
Whether you know your next step or need help, please email us at [email protected] for feedback and suggestions. Of course, we have found the best way to teach topics and are happy to answer any questions you have about school.develpreneur.com and how to leverage application-based training into a new job or position. You can register for free and view course outlines. Likewise, we have a broad range of free content to help you decide if you agree.
