Is Your Résumé Out of Date?

Written by Chris Makell.

How do you know when you need to update your résumé?

As your personal marketing tool, a résumé is invaluable in documenting your skills and achievements to a potential employer or positioning yourself for that much-desired promotion.

When you create it, you invest a lot of time and energy putting it together, polishing it up, and formatting it. Finally, it looks great, and it contains all of the key components you think you need. So why would you need to update it?

According to Dr. Meilee Bridges, an educator and editor who specializes in academic and career writing, “Many people create résumés based on the rules from 10 years ago, and so much has changed. For instance, you no longer need to include an objective, and you want to include non-work related activities to demonstrate the broader range of skills you’ve developed.”

But if you’re like most of us, you put off updating your résumé until you need it…and that is a big mistake. Why? Because if you are not keeping track of your experiences and achievements as they take place or soon after, they can often be lost to history.

This is just one of the inside tips Meilee will share at WCA’s Résumé Review Workshop on March 5, 2016, at the American Heart Association from 10:00 a.m. to noon.

She will give you easy-to-use tips and techniques for creating a powerful résumé and the all-important insight into how to keep it updated! You’ll learn the fundamentals along with how to make it (and you!) stand out in a job search or promotion.

In addition, there will be a highly interactive Q&A session so that you can get your individual burning questions answered live. RSVP by emailing students@wcaustin.org.

With all the complexities of building an effective résumé, such as what HR looks for when scanning a résumé and professional trends in résumé development, you want to stay ahead of the curve by learning from someone who stays on the cutting edge of résumé writing.

As Meilee points out, “There’s never a bad time to update your résumé, and knowing what goes on it as well as what to leave out can give you exceptional confidence when pursuing that dream job.”