Creating Your First Resume

This book clearly shows how to make a positive impression with a resume tailored for your skills, accomplishments, and dreams. If you think you have no skills or accomplishments, think again: the author will coach you through with easy brainstorming activities offered only after a variety of examples. Although I bought this book for my son, I am planning on benefitting from some of the format illustrations for my own career goals. After all, the do's and don'ts for resumes today are not the same as when I wrote my first resume and it's important to have this updated information. This guide answers all the detailed questions, but is presented with easy to read lists to check off and well placed, small chunks of usable information. I wish that the templates were available for these resumes, but the since content of the resume is just as important and I recommend using this book as a resource for generating your own resume, even if it's not your "first." Also, if you're Word or Adobe savvy, you can copy the styles you see. If not, you may want to take this book to someone who can take the types of skills and accomplishments this book encouraged you to generate and choose from the formatting examples and put it all together to create a similar looking resume. (OR, you can learn the formatting tools yourself with short and easy YouTube tutorials.) This resource provides examples geared for students seeking internships, new graduates starting their career, and even military veterans seeking civilian work. I'm glad I invested in it, and I think my son will be glad, too.

I remember writing resumes in my 20s and 30s, before I started my own business. Now it’s been many, many years, and I like how Creating Your First Resume really breaks down all the elements, without a lot of fluff to have to wade through. The coverage of the basic sections is a good reminder, and there are great examples of skills lists, types of accomplishments, and keywords selections. I’m most excited about the sample resumes designed in the free HLOOM templates from Microsoft. Resumes sure have changed and gotten better looking! It also helps to see how others have presented what they have to offer in a compelling way. You can see that the author has a lot of experience writing resumes. This basic book is helping me write a strong resume in my spare time, as my life is very busy.

As a current college student pursuing a degree in visual communications, creating my first resume was an easy step-by-step process thanks to the resume formats. Following the format of Emily Thompson's resume, I was able to quickly develop resume that best featured my current education, and experience in graphic/web design. I used HLOOM to create a beautiful layout for my resume and was inspired to re-edit the layout in Adobe Indesign! Because of Creating Your First Resume I was able to land an internship as Web Designer!