Believe it or not there is a resume for those with no work experience; it is called a functional resume. Usually, this is for interns and students. It can also be for those who may have been stay at home moms or housewives and have been out of the work force for a long time. This is not looked upon with as much pessimism as people think. Yes, it is best to have some experience, but did you know that your life experience is just as important and you can word it in such a way as to impress the employer enough to hire you?
The positive points to showcase in your resume:
- Loyalty
- Organizational Skills
- Multitasking ability
- Administrative ability
- Leadership ability
OK let’s start with these. We can showcase these skills within the confines of what you do, either at home, at school, or both. Were you in any clubs or organizations at school? Even organizations in high school, will count. The idea is to showcase the positive skills you have and back it up with dates and times, this is what any resume does. However, they need to be ‘marketable’ skills you have developed, and be relative to what you are applying for. However, even the skills and achievements that you do not think can be used; can be used. Any skill or leadership ability that you can showcase is good for a resume. It is all about selling yourself.
So let’s structure this according to dynamic…
Resume for Stay at home moms
Are you managing a family? Do you take your family to games and lessons? Then you have hit the loyalty button and guess what? You can in fact manage others too. If you are a stay at home mom for a long time, then you are loyal.
If you do all of the above mentioned and take care of the house, you are a multitasking expert, and able to work under pressure. This is a quality that is looked upon by most employers, because these days you are doing more than one job to save the employer money. They use less people to achieve more tasks.
We already covered leadership ability, but, administrative ability is the one that people get hung up on. This can be covered in part by playing up the tasks you do at home by taking care of the family bills. This and anything like this are administrative duties that you do on a weekly basis. If you are also the one who takes care of the phone calls going out to the repair companies for the house, or any company you deal with, then this can also be considered an administrative duty.
The only downside to this, is that in truth, it is quite a bit harder to get a job when you have been a stay at home mom for a long time, because employers will want some kind of in-house experience in an office environment. This is because technology is moving at the speed of light and if you don’t possess the experience with those skills you may be in for a disappointment.
So what does a stay at home mom that is reentering the workforce do with her resume?
These days, the best thing to do is to go to a temporary agency and allow them to do two things for you, free of charge of course. You should not be paying a fee to work for someone. You allow them to rework your resume and tailor it to the job that they are looking at hiring you for. Take whatever job you are offered just to get your foot in the door and get going. Also, allow them to train you on their in-house computer and customer care training programs so they can send your scores to the employers when you test out. And don’t worry; it is in the agencies best interest to send your best score out to employers. The good news is, you can take it as many times as you want.
So what if you are a fresh college graduate just coming out of school and entering the workforce?
This is a lot easier than the above scenario, simply because the student would be exposed to modern standard business practices, especially if they were in school for a business or computer degree. If you are up on the technology and can showcase that in your resume, then you are ahead of the game.
- What to cover on a functional, student, or intern resume:
- What are your knowledge of technology and the practical application of it?
- What clubs and organizations have you belonged to?
- What was your GPA? This is your (grade point average), showcase it only if it was 3.0 or more.
- What were your honors or accolades?
- Have you participated in any internship?
These things are paramount and should be showcased in your resume. This showcases all the points that were mentioned in the above stay at home mom
what template do you use?
The best thing you can do is to use a word processing program and look at the templates. If you use Word® then go through these steps in the program.
- Go to start
- Document
- New
- Choose template for resume
- Choose functional resume
Now just so you know, some of these programs have people just like you upload their own documents. They will have titles like internship resume and the like so if you take a moment to look, you may be able to find one which will fit your need.
Photo Credit under creative commons.
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