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:
- Work through the comprehensive video content below.
- 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, visit the Field Experience Resource page.
1. Understand the purpose of a resume
It is first important to explore the purpose of a resume. Keeping the needs of a hiring manager in mind while constructing your resume can help you target your resume and speak to an organization’s unique needs. Click on the short tutorial below to learn more about how to draft a resume that gets you noticed!
2. Choose an appropriate layout and design
Selecting a layout that highlights your strengths and skills is essential to building a successful resume. The brief tutorials below will help you assemble an industry-appropriate design.
Reminder for Teachers College Students - Please utilize the layouts found on the Field Experience Resource page for preclinical field placement, and the Teaching Resources page (when applying to teaching positions).
Resume Samples & Templates
You must download and save the resume sample to your computer for editing.
3. Build your content
After you have selected an appropriate layout, it is time to start building effective resume content. Work through the series of tutorials below for strategies to help you emphasize your own unique skills and accomplishments.
Build Your Content: Header & Profile
Build Your Content: Education
Build Your Content: Experience
Build Your Content: Other Considerations
4. Prepare for Career & Professional Development review
Review the following tutorial for guidelines that will help you prepare for your official review.
Review for Accuracy & Impact
Supplemental Resources
- 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.
5. Request a review
STEP 1
Attend a Resume Webinar or please carefully review all videos and resources available above. (Note: Teachers College FE students should attend the webinar specifically designed for Field Experience; all other students should attend the general resume webinar).
STEP 2
Update or develop a draft of your resume (must be created in a Word document).
STEP 3
Complete the Resume Self-Review.
All resume submissions must have the completed/filled out Resume Self-Review attached in order to receive a resume 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 a webinar or the videos 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.