WGU Career & Professional Development
Resource Library
Resumes
Understanding Resume Best Practices
Your resume is a living document that you will update and share with employers and connections throughout your career. Depending upon your preferences, select one (or more) of these options to ensure your competency in writing a strong resume that makes a positive professional impression:
- Watch the LinkedIn Learning Course, Optimizing Your Resume for Applicant Tracking Systems. Note: As a student and alum of WGU, you have free access to all LinkedIn Learning trainings. To view a course in its entirety, you will need to sign in. Click on this sign-on link and login with your wgu.edu credentials.
- Attend one of our Resume Webinars.
- Work through our detailed Resume Guide.
Teachers College Students - For resume resources to apply for a teaching position, visit our Teaching Resources page. To build your field experience resume, view the FE resume webinar or visit the Field Experience Resource page.
Resume Samples & Templates
Please note that you must be logged in to WGU to access the links below. Download and save the resume sample to your computer for editing.
Supplemental Resources
- How to Build a Strong Professional Profile
- Resume Action Verbs
- Accomplishment Statement Worksheet
- Questions to Ask to Create Awesome Accomplishments
- Resume Guide
- Resume Self-Review Checklist - We require a completed Self-Review to include with your resume draft when you send it in for a review by a Career Advisor. Your advisor will be able to focus more on providing you with content suggestions that highlight your skills and experiences if you’ve already taken care of some common issues that you can address first using the Self-Review.
- O*Net-SOC AutoCoder - Instantly provides a high-quality occupational classification based on your resume or job description, identifies key words critical to include on your resume, and confirms that your resume is targeted toward your career goal/s.
- TagCrowd - Use your resume and a job description to create your own word clouds to visualize word frequency and ensure your resume aligns with the job description.
Request a Review
STEP 2
Update or develop a draft of your resume (must be created in a Word document).
STEP 3
Complete the Resume Self-Review. This document helps us best personalize our feedback and address any specific questions that you may have.
Resumes that appear to have not followed the steps above and incorporated the recommendations from the resources above will be returned without a review. We will be evaluating resume submissions to ensure that they follow the best practices in these areas:
- Formatting (no templates, tables, columns, inconsistent spacing, images/icons, colors, etc.)
- Content (thorough descriptions of experience in bullet point format)
- Length (resumes should not extend more than 2 pages, depending on experience)
STEP 4
Send a Word version of your resume AND completed self-review document to careers@wgu.edu.
Please note: Occasionally our review emails get routed to students' spam folders. If you do not receive your review within 4 business days, please check your spam folder.