[MUSIC] In this module, you'll learn how to write strong accomplishment statements and keyword rich summaries and objectives. You'll learn how to use two websites that can help you find powerful language for your resumes. And you'll learn a potent technique to make your resumes more inclusive, more interesting, and more readable. For this first lesson here, you're going to learn how to present your background in a way that showcases your competencies. Your competencies, your knowledge, skills, abilities and other personal qualities needed to do the job. Determine a decision maker's perception of how qualified you are. A resume that makes it past the robots still gets reviewed by decision makers. They decide who to bring in for interviews. To maximize your chance of being invited in for an interview, your resume needs to provide relevant, specific evidence that you are highly competent in the areas needed by the hiring manager. In the modern day, Anglo-American culture, it's not enough to show that you have relevant experience. You must show evidence that you have experience in putting into use the particular skills, knowledge, abilities, and personal qualities that are needed by the organization. In a traditional resume, you list your experiences such as qualifications, training, or jobs that you had, and sometimes list your achievements. Typically, you do not describe how you achieved success. These typical resumes often look like catalogues of job descriptions. They do little more than list job duties. But what you need to do is turn your job duties into positive accomplishments and convey those accomplishments to a prospective employer. In a modern resume, in a competency based resume, you describe how you acted in certain situations and the results that your actions produced. This gives reviewers the opportunity to judge the extent to which you are capable of applying the same behaviors in a new job. The competency based resume plays the same role in the resume game that the behavioral interview plays in the interview game. And the strategies you use for preparing for one also help you prepare for the other. This leads to the first principle in writing strong accomplishment statements. Your accomplishment statements should demonstrate experience and give evidence for the competencies the organization is looking for. Let's look at a couple of examples. Here's an example statement from the resume of a marketing communications manager with a bit more than ten years of experience. You can find the whole resume in the readings for this lesson. Notice the action verbs here, built, constructed, managed, and trained. The verbs use simple past because the accomplishment is presented as just that, something accomplished, a result achieved. And that result is specific, generated $4 million return on investment to date. Here's an example that demonstrates team leadership competency. Notice the use of the verb coordinated instead of the more plain, vanilla led or managed. If you coordinate a team, you get all the members to work effectively as a whole. By referencing sales, administration, and technical support, this statement demonstrates the ability to get different groups to work cooperatively. The multigenerational reference points to a particularly desirable 21st century competency. Namely, coordinating a workforce comprising Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials, and soon, Generation Z. You might notice something else here. In the third course in this specialization, you learned about the S-T-A-R, STAR strategy for responding to behavioral interview questions. Situation, task or target, action and results. This strategy also captures the second principle of writing strong accomplishment statements. You learned about the strategy from the beginning with your story file. You take time to describe what the situation was, or what the problem was that you solved. What action did you take? What was the result? How did the organization benefit from what you did? I hope you recognize that the steps you take to prepare a resume and the steps you take to prepare for an interview overlap. In an interview, you'll be invited to tell the story. Again, not the 10 to 15 minute version you might entertain your friends with. But the 2 to 3 minute version that captures the highlights. On your resume, your stories are condensed even further, but they're the same stories. You write about them almost like you'd write a synopsis of a movie or a TV program. Here's an example. As this shows, a strong accomplishment statement includes the situational problem, which here was a high rate of billing errors and a protracted AR cycle. The statements summarize the action taken. Here, that being to design and develop a database. And the statement presents the results in quantifiable terms. Results in quantifiable terms communicate that something of value was accomplished. In the interview, the candidate might well be asked to relate the story in more detail. Describing the problem, elaborating on the actions, then detailing the results. On the resume, the accomplishment statement piques the reviewer's interest. It communicates competencies in analytic thinking, in working with accounting processes, in interpersonal relations, and of course, technical competencies in database development with Access. From the statements you've seen so far, you can glean this, the 3rd principle of strong accomplishment statements. The use of strong action verbs is so important that a later lesson in this module is devoted to helping you with it. Good action words provide energy. They make it easier for someone skimming your resume to quickly determine what you know how to do. Manage, budget, design, convert, customize, remodel, transform, facilitate, motivate, navigate, negotiate, all actions of value to an organization. In contrast, was responsible for, communicates very little. Principle number 4 is well illustrated in the previous statements. You want to use specific examples to support your experience with each competency you've identified as relevant for the position. Include specific details to prove your credibility, and to show you actually have experience in a particular area. Principle number 5 should be familiar to you. You always want to quantify your examples. This is especially important when describing the results of your actions. The person reading your resume needs to understand how valuable your accomplishment was to an organization. For example, compare these two versions of the same accomplishment. Which version do you find more credible? If you were a hiring manager, which version would be more effective in persuading you to interview the candidate? Enough said. So how do you incorporate these principles into your resume? How do you turn your experience into strong evidence of your competencies? First, prepare your accomplishments inventory. What did you do? What problems did you solve? What new processes did you implement? Second, quantify those accomplishments. How many people were impacted? By what percentage did you exceed your goals? How much money did you earn or save? Third, add in the benefits to the organization. The things you've accomplished will mean much more if you can demonstrate how they helped advance the goals of the organization. It's those tangible benefits that will convey your value to a prospective employer. Finally, in reading the example accomplishment statements from this lesson, you might have noticed this. Principle number 6, you want to say as much as you can, in as few words as you need. Eliminate words like various and numerous and use actual numbers instead. Remove pronouns and articles that do not add to your content. Also, it's better to round off numbers and percentages than to use words like approximately or around. Another way of thinking about this last principle is the axiom, less is more. Because your resume should send a message that is focused and precise, just like you. [MUSIC]
