Becca helps Aime with different action words for her resume.
Everyone agrees that you should have resume when you go out and look for a job. But if you have been on the production of side business or service industries you are not likely to have a resume. Add to that a rough patch in life of unemployment or housing challenges and the creation of a professional looking one page synopsis of your skills, strengths and experience may not have been a priority.
Up And At It recently held a one day resume writing and creation workshop for residents in the Cottage Housing program in Sacramento. The singular goal of the one day program was to have the participants leave with a resume in hand.
Strengths, skills and experience
One of most difficult aspects of preparing a resume with impact is to distill the skills and strengths
Becca helps Aime with different action words for her resume.
to build a well rounded summary statement. The workshop focused on exercises to help the job seekers pull out their core strengths or personal qualities they bring to an employer. We paired that with exercises to identify their most valuable job related skills. After those two intensive soul-searching sessions, the participants had little trouble creating a one or two sentence summary statement of their core strengths, skills, and experience for an employment field they had chosen.
Individualized attention
The next step was having the resume writers sit down with a volunteer to type up the final document. Volunteers continued to work with the participants to create a resume that reflected the individual, not just some words pulled out of a book. We were able to create resumes for 9 folks and get 2 others much closer to a finished product. All the participants, as well as the volunteers, were jazzed that these folks had one more puzzle piece to complete the job picture.
