What's the most important part of a resume?
What do you think is the most important part of the resume?
Honestly, it depends on the situation you’re in. Someone applying for a corporate finance job with prior experience won’t have the same type of resume as someone applying for the same corporate finance job after being in account management. But for the sake of simplicity, I’ve narrowed down the 2 most common situations and ranked the 4 things I’d personally rank as the most important components.
For a corporate-bound resume, coming from a college student:
Work experience
Leadership experience
Competitions you’ve won
Actual skills you can prove that you have(Meaning that if you wrote “proficient in Excel”,you won’t worry about them asking you to create macros. Which is a problem I had when I made the mistake of overstating my skills.)
For a CV headed towards academe, research, or fellowships, and belongs to someone who has a few years of experience in that field already:
Papers Published / Research Assisted
Work Experience / Conferences Presented At
Link to your portfolio
Conferences/ Workshops Attended
Notes I want to stress:
Leadership experience isn’t limited to people management, like being a project head.
Leadership experience means that you got something done, with or without a team behind you, and you did it well.Undertaking some important task or advocacy, no matter how big or small it is, is being a leader. Regardless if you’re an introvert or extrovert, detail-oriented analyzer or big picture thinker, planner or activator, so long as you’re someone who sees a problem and does something about it (plus tracks the results of it), then you’re a leader. And you can put that project experience in your resume.For conferences and workshops, its level of importance could be equal to work experience, dependent on the context of said conferences and workshops.
If they are internationally recognized, and you being shortlisted for it is considered an honor, then that takes priority. It has built in context for your field, after all. And like I always say, context is king when it comes to resumes.
Related: What’s more impressive, internship experience or school achievements in a resume?
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Like I said in the beginning, what you prioritize in your resume will always depend on the situation you’re in.
Highlighting experiences that are relevant for the specific job you’re applying for is most important when making a resume. If you don’t have the “right” kind of experience for whatever role you’re going for, then you’ll need to reposition your current experience instead. How you present yourself for the role can sometimes be what makes you the standout candidate.
Good luck! And if you take my advice, let me know how it goes!
Hi! I’m Justine.
I’m the founder and writer of all things in The Bumpy Career and welcome to Resume, a slot where I share things I’ve learned over the course of fixing my own and a lot of people's resumes, so that you guys don’t have to trial and error this stuff like I did. If you’ve got any questions I haven’t answered yet, feel free to drop them here.
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