Resume: A Brief Account That Has Prepared Me
My focus for the last couple of months has been on the resume. If I thought about it, it was my first love when it came to Career Coaching because it allowed me to re-frame my friend’s work experience in ways that helped her see the value.
Which is crazy that she didn’t see what I saw in her. She transitioned from video editing in Seattle to film editing in LA all while reading books on finance. She then turned her career into a passion for banking. Really, her passion is doing what is right for people, and her creative expression was through banking. It also helped that in the Pacific Northwest she could speak both Mandarin and Cantonese in addition to English.
In talking through a resume I discover both a powerful way to prepare for interviews, and an amazing way to help excavate value. Everything we do has value because it makes us who we are today. In life we leave nothing behind. In our work we don’t either, we just can fit it all in one document! If you were to go back and think through what you studied in school, and how that informs what you do now, would you think differently about that program? What do you and don’t you give yourself credit for?
Resume: To Occupy Again
Reclaim your achievement. Resume your position as the promising candidate, and take back the value that you have earned through the experiences you have had. One achievement that my immediate family seems to think I don’t claim is that I have an Emmy for a program I worked on while I was in local news. I realized that is not the case, because I can look at that gleaming statue and remember. What I have forgotten, a skill long ago earned in a college class, is the understanding and writing of HTML. That is something that, as I started combing through code, I realized it never dawned on me to mention while I was talking with those I met at a coding bootcamp.
If you were to look again are your resume what would you remember? What would you reclaim? What would you learn about who you are and where you’ve come from?
