One of the first things you can do to make your career journal work for you is to use it to update your current resume. While some of the things that you have written in your career journal may not be appropriate for your resume there is still a lot of good information at your disposal that you can use. The main things that you want to focus on in your resume include your objective, your summary profile and the results that you achieve for each of your previous employers. If you have been keeping your career journal updated this should be an easy task.
Let's get started by looking at your objective statement. A common mistake that people make when writing their objective is to make it all about themselves. Your objective should focus instead on what the employer needs and not what you want. When writing your objective you should state how your education, skills and work experience will directly benefit your potential employer. For example, does your current objective reflect your ability to make the company money, save the company money or improve the productivity of the company. If not, you should take some time looking through your career journal to determine which of these three areas represent your greatest strength.
The second thing that you want to work on is your summary profile. Your summary profile should highlight key achievements obtained during the course of your work history. Ideally, these should be quantified statements. Using numbers when writing about your achievements is very powerful and paints a picture in the mind of the employer in terms of what you could potentially do for their company if hired. When writing your summary profile be sure to use bullet points and active versus passive wording. Your summary profile will be one of the first things that an employer sees when reviewing your resume so it is important that you gauge their interest early on so they will be inspired to continue reading.
The third thing you want to do is to ensure that the rest of the language used in your resume supports the information given in your summary profile. When writing about your job responsibilities you should write about the results you achieve while performing that responsibility and not simply list them as so many people do. Generally, employers already know what responsibilities are entailed in a particular position. So, just as with your summary profile you will want to use statements that quantified which focus on your results. I like to call them impact statements. For each job that you have held you will want to state what impact your work performance had on the role or position to which you were assigned.
Let's summarize what we have covered. First, you will want to draw information from your career journal that can be used to update your resume. Secondly, when updating your resume you will want to focus on your objective, your summary profile and the results that you achieved for each of your previously held positions. Then you will want to use active wording throughout the resume, bullet points and quantify each statement. As a result, by applying the information contained in your career journal to your new resume you will find that the number of career opportunities available to you will be greatly increased.
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For the past 17 years, Sheila Savage has worked with ex-offenders to help them find suitable employment. To get more information about ex-offender employment and job searching please visit [http://www.sheilamsavage.com]
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