Tag Archives: Employment

Writing your resume, part 1: The Chronological Style

Posted by Mike Grice on

Finding a job is a process, and a critical part of that process is having a resume that will entice prospective employers into calling you in for an interview.  We’re going to be taking a few deep dives into the wonderful world of resumes over the next few posts, but before we put pen to paper or electron to screen let’s talk a little about resumes in general.

There are as many opinions about resumes as there are people who write and read them.  Just type “Resume” into Google and you will find over 80 million results.  Clicking a few links will take you to sites that proclaim that resumes are dead and that the “new” business world uses social media to find employees while other sites say that traditional resumes are the key to finding work at established and respectable companies.  What I am writing about are the things that I have learned and used to get jobs after leaving the military, so keep that in mind as we talk about resumes.  I have used all three types in my pursuit of employment, and all three have resulted in job offers.

There are three basic types of standard resumes, and each has its place depending on the circumstance and type of job you are pursuing.  In today’s post we will take a look at the style that is most commonly used: The Chronological style.

The chronological form of a resume is the simplest of the three to put together.  In simple terms it tells the story of your professional life and career history to the prospective employer, who then decides whether or not you are worth bringing in to meet in person.

There are pros and cons to the chronological format, so let’s look at each in turn:

Pros

  • It shows the relevance of your work experience over time.  It is actually a “reverse-chronological” resume because you list your most recent experience first and work backwards from there, but everyone just calls it the chronological style for simplicity’s sake.  Since it shows your most recent work first, you can highlight your current skill set and talents up front and show how you have garnered experience and developed those skills over time.
  • It is fact based.  Since you list your experience on a timeline you can show when you learned your skills, where and when you received relevant education and training, and articulate your experience to show how you have grown professionally over time.
  • It is a universal format that is understood across industries and around the world.
  • It can add credibility by showing what organizations you have worked in and the duties you performed in them throughout your career.  This can also be a con, however, because you must remember that civilian hiring managers have no idea about military units or service jargon, so you need to be able to put your experience into terms that they will understand.

Cons

  • This is not a good format in cases where you have little or no experience to show.  For example, if you were in the military for one enlistment this format will probably work to your disadvantage because you don’t have that much to show for experience over time.  In that case, a functional resume (which we’ll talk about in a future post) is probably a better format to use.
  • It is also not a good format in cases where you have large time gaps in your experience base.  Since it the format is a timeline, having gaps of a year or two here and there may raise a few eyebrows on the employer’s side of the fence.
  • Likewise, if you have switched jobs frequently then this may not be the best format to use.  That telegraphs to the employer that you may not be committed to working for them in the long term.
  • It also may not be a good format for people looking for specific jobs in specific industries that require specific skills – the combination or functional formats are much better suited for those circumstances.

So let’s get to it!

The basic format that I use for the chronological resume contains four elements of information:

1)  Your name and contact information, including your telephone number and email address.  As I wrote earlier, make sure that your telephone number is one that you can control (i.e., your cel phone) because you don’t want your preschooler answering the phone when a potential employer calls.  It may be cute, but you probably won’t get the message that they called.  Also, make sure your voicemail greeting is professional sounding – “Yo, dude, I am getting hammered right now and can’t answer my phone!” will not result in a job offer.  Trust me!  Likewise, make sure your email address is not offensive or controversial.  If yours is “drunkguy@whatever.com” then get a free gmail or yahoo email address and use it solely for job search purposes.  I don’t recommend including your home address on your resume, though, because you cannot control where it will end up.  Identity thieves are everywhere.

2)  A summary statement.  This is a thumbnail sketch of who you are in terms of your experience.  Not everyone agrees that you need one, but I include one in my resume to get the attention of the reader as quickly as possible- after all, they are reading hundreds of these things and if you don’t grab their interest quickly your resume will land in the trash can.

3)  Your experience over time.  This is the meat of the resume.  Here is where you need to show what you are made of and what you have done in such a manner that the employer will like what they see.  It is a remarkably difficult task to be able to strip down a lifetime’s worth of experience into less than two pages, so be ready to spend some time on this section.  I recommend that you include no more than ten years worth of experience (for those with more) because anything beyond that timeframe is pretty dated, and the most relevant stuff is the most recent stuff anyway.  The format I use lists my job title first along with the associated dates, and then put a few bullets underneath that show what I did in that job.  It took me a lot of practice to write my military experience down in such a way that a non-military person could understand it.  Also, look at how the bullets are formed: They follow the “action verb” format, meaning that they show that I did something followed by the effects of what I did.  This resonates much more than using the passive tense.

4)  Your education and other pertinent info.  The education bit is self explanatory, but what about certifications, awards, or other things that you have done that reinforce your work history or differentiate you from the pack?   This is where they go.  For my resume, I include things like awards I have received, associations I am affiliated with, and applicable qualifications and certifications.  Things not to include are your hobbies, marital status, family information, or anything not related to the job you are seeking.  Those things can be distractors for the reader and may actually turn them off; if you write that you are an avid hunter and the reader is a vegetarian then you are in for trouble.  Also, you only have two pages, so don’t waste space on things that don’t matter!

At any rate, the chronological style is the best resume type to start with.  You will use elements of it for the other two formats as well, so you won’t have to reinvent any wheels.

The internet is full of samples that you can check out.  Here is what my chronological resume from when I left active duty looks like: Chronological Resume , so feel free to follow the style I used or branch out on your own.  For what it’s worth, this particular resume resulted in a job offer.

In the next post we’ll tackle the functional resume format…

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Lessons Learned:

1.  Of the three basic resume types, the Chronological Style is the most common and most widely used.

2.  It is best for those who have no interruptions in their job history and can show a logical progression in education, skills, and experience over time.

3.  It is not the best resume for very specific skill sets or for those with very little experience or education to show.  The functional format is best for those circumstances.

4.  Only include the things that matter; keep your hobbies personal items off of the resume.

5.  Proofread, proofread, proofread.  Then proofread again.  Believe it or not, I just saw a typo on the resume I included in this post.  See if you can find it….

6.  Make it professional, and keep it to two pages!

Back to Resumes

Posted by Mike Grice on

Let’s get back to talking about resumes.  We have covered some of the basics of business correspondence already but now we need to get down to the serious business of crafting your resume.

Before we get started, though, we need to answer the question: What is a resume, anyway?  More important, what is a good resume?

A resume is a document that condenses a person’s skills, education, and experience into a short one or two pages.  The purpose of the resume is to find employment, and in the normal course of jobseeking events it is usually the step that (hopefully!) leads to a job interview.

It is probably the most important single document you will produce in your job search.  Without one potential employers will not even know you exist, and with a great one you will be much more likely to get an interview.  The problem is that there are a lot of really average to poor resumes out there because people don’t follow some of the simple rules that lead to a good resume.

While there is no guarantee that a good resume will result in a job interview and a career in the sweet new career that you want, I can certainly guarantee that a bad resume will keep you out of the building.  So what can you do to get out of the “average” pile?

The first thing you must recognize is that your resume is your first impression with the company where you want a job.  You may have met someone who asked you to send them your resume, but it is very unlikely that they are the actual hiring manager or decision maker who will present you with an offer.  That person will know you only by the document that you send in, so your paper had better be focused, well written, and error free.

Let’s talk the error free bit first.  Remember that this is your first impression, and if it contains grammatical or spelling errors you are telegraphing to your potential employer that you either that you have poor skills with the English language or are too lazy to proofread your resume.  Nobody is going to read your misspellings and think “Oh boy!  I really want to hire someone who can’t spell!!”

A way you make sure your resume is error free is to proof read it yourself and have others proofread it as well.  I recommend that you print out your resume and read it as though you were a teacher grading an exam.  Don’t just read it on the computer screen because you will miss things –  people tend to miss grammar errors that are not identified by their word processing program (like “there” and “their”, for example).  Get out a red pen and critically examine it.  You will be surprised at the errors you find.  Make sure to double check your contact information as well – I accidentally misspelled the city I live in on my early resumes and missed it because it was in the header.  An interviewer caught it and I felt like a complete moron because I had read and reread it a dozen times but skipped the header without thinking about it.

Your resume must be well written.  That is easy to say but very difficult to do, particularly with the requirement to keep it short.  You need to be able to distill your whole professional life, including your schooling, work experience, training, and skills into a few pages.  Much easier said than done!  Mark Twain, the quintessential American 19th century writer, put it best when his publisher sent him a telegram asking to write a couple of pages in a couple of days:

        From the publisher:

NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS.

    Twain replied:

NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS.

CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS.

NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES.

We will get much more deeply into how to craft a well written resume in future posts as we delve into the different types and methods of writing them.  One thing to keep in mind as well is that your audience, the hiring manager, is a civilian who likely has no knowledge about the military much less whatever your occupational specialty was.  You will need to translate military-speak and jargon into simple English.  Otherwise the reader will be confused and your resume will rocket into the trashcan.  The point is that it is a lot harder than you think to shrink your life down to a few pages and still get the message of why you should be hired across.

Your resume must be focused.  This goes hand in hand with the stricture that it must be well written, but you will find these two concepts at odds as you compile your resume.  You will want to tell the employer why you are the right person and support it with a lot of vignettes and experiences, but you don’t have the space to wax eloquently about how great you were at you whatever you did.  You need to be able to strip it down the the essence of what you are trying to say without all of the fluff –  and you need to be able to do it so that it reads well.

You won’t need 30 days to write your two page resume, though.  It takes time and practice to write a good resume, and how you write depends on the type of document you choose to compile.  There are three basic types of resumes, and each is written differently.  We will dive into each in much greater detail in future posts, but here is a quick rundown of each type:

The most common and easiest to write is the chronological resume.  This is basically a brief history of what you have been doing.  This resume is great for situations where you may not know the specific job you are going after or in cases where you go to a job fair and have the opportunity to hand out a bunch of resumes to corporate recruiters.  It is also the least focused of the types, which can be a problem if companies are looking for specific skills or talents.  It is also not a good resume for someone with little experience such as a newly graduated student who has not yet landed his or her first job.

The second basic type is the functional resume.  The functional resume presents your skills in a sorted fashion that shows what you are good at and what expertise you offer to the company.  This type of resume is useful in areas where specific skill sets or talents are needed for a job.  They are very common in the health care and scientific fields because they articulate your strengths and abilities in specific areas that should target the job you are looking for.

The third and often most useful type is the combination resume.  This incorporates both chronological and the functional components into the resume and provides the company with insight into your experience over time as well as your specific skill sets.  It is the toughest to write, though, for the reason that Mark Twain complained about to his publisher: now you have to essentially bring together two resumes into one and keep it within two pages.

It can be done, though, and in the upcoming string of posts we will go into each resume type in great detail…

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Lessons Learned:

1)  Resumes need to be short and to the point.  Two pages is as long as they should be except in very specific circumstances.

2)  The resume is your first impression with the person or people who will make the decision to hire you, so you had better provide your best possible product:  Error free and grammatically correct!

3)  There are three basic types of resumes:  Chronological, Functional, and Combination.  Which one you use depends on the company you are applying to and the job you are seeking.  More on that in future posts.

It’s time for a new career, but where do you start?

Posted by Mike Grice on

I have been writing about transition for nearly a year now, and during that time I have made the journey myself.  It has been a very interesting, sometime daunting, and often challenging trip.  I am on the other side of the fence now, and have been very fortunate to find an interesting job that helped ease my way into civilianhood.

What we are going to be talking about for the next few posts is how to find a job, or at least how to present yourself in the best way possible so that you are competitive in the job market.

In the military you started out just like everyone else.  You were a recruit or an officer candidate with short hair and very little knowledge or experience about the military.  As you progressed through training and headed out to the operating forces you learned what was expected of you and how things are done.  Over time you met people and developed a professional reputation which helped you obtain desirable and rewarding assignments.  By the end of your military career you had developed a solid reputation and a tremendously helpful network of peers, juniors, and seniors.

Once you take off your uniform, however, your reputation largely goes with it.  The civilian world and corporate sector will the thankful for your service but they will have no idea what you did because military service is a mystery to them.  While your military network will still be around it won’t help too much because you aren’t looking for a job in the military.  You just left, remember?

So the long and the short of it is that you are starting over.  Nobody is going to hire you just because you formerly wore a uniform.  You need to do the same things you did as a young recruit or officer candidate; you need to begin the process of building a new network and a new professional reputation.

We’ll start with the basics.  There are a lot of things you will need to do, and it can seem overwhelming if you try to do them all at once: Build a resume.  Craft a cover letter.  Research where you would like to live and work.  Find a rewarding new career.  Meet people.  Learn how things are done in the corporate sector.  It’s a lot, so let’s take a look at the very first and simplest things you can do to get started.

As you transition you passed through various transition courses and have probably attended some job fairs.  If you were paying attention you probably saw people chatting here and there, and at some point in the conversation they exchanged business cards.

They are networking.  You need to network too, and in order to network effectively you will need to get some business cards.  They are important because when you are hunting for a job you are competing with a lot of other people, and as you network you will be meeting men and women who can help steer you towards a new career.  They are not going to remember your name or even who you are if you don’t give them something to carry away with them; after all you may be one of many people that they meet on any given day.  I guarantee that you will not get a call from someone who does not know your phone number.  Help them and you by giving them a card. Your card.

Not all cards are created equally.  There are services that will print them up for free (with an advertisement for the company on the back, of course) and you can print them on your home computer as well.  If you don’t have anything (or even worse, if you only have cards that have your old job and contact information on them) you can use those services or print your own until you can have some quality cards made up.

I am a fan of spending a few dollars to create a high quality professional looking card.  Anybody can get free ones or print their own and that telegraphs that you are either cheap or not motivated enough to increase the quality of your business cards above the masses.  Remember –  the card is a representation of you.  It is all that the person you handed it to has to remember you by, so make sure that you leave a good impression.

I recommend going to a stationery or paper store that produces business cards.  You will be surprised at the incredible variety of products available, with myriad colors, shapes, fonts, and cardstocks to choose from.  Take a look at the catalogs from the perspective of how you want to be represented and remembered.  A rule of thumb is to be conservative because that is what is expected in the business world, which is white or off white.  A scarlet card with gold letters may make your heart glow with its familiar Marine Corps colors but it will not help you build a network in the business world because it will show that you cannot let go of your past.  Remember, you are out to make a whole new set of first impressions!

Select a font in a size that isn’t obnoxiously big or unreadably tiny.  Put on the card only the information relevant to you and your job search.  Avoid quotations or sayings that may put people off: “If you ain’t infantry you ain’t squat” may be pithy around the barracks but is actually insulting when you are looking for a job from a non-infantryman in the corporate sector.  And none of them are infantrymen.

Pick a cardstock that is heftier and stronger than the cards you can get for free.  They feel cheap.  You want something that presents you as a serious and high quality person, and a solid card is a good way to to start.

Finally, decide what you want printed on your card.  I recommend that you go with the basics at first: Your name, contact telephone number, and email address.  Don’t put your callsign or nickname because it comes across as being a bit amateurish to people who don’t understand why people call you “Smasher” or “Speedy”. It is more formal to put down your whole name, but it is OK to put down what you prefer to be called.  If you are named Patrick but go by Pat feel free to go with it.

After your name include the best contact information – after all that is why you are printing these things up in the first place.  I recommend that you put down your cel phone as that way you are more likely to be there in case you are called, but remember to update your voicemail greeting to sound professional or they will hang up before leaving a message.  Also include your email address, but like the voicemail you may need to update it in case it is incomprehensible, odd, or inappropriate.  Email addresses like “drunkdude@whatever.com” will not get you a job.  I promise.

So go out and have some cards made up.  Carry them wherever you go because you never know when an opportunity to network will come up.  Have a few in your wallet or purse.  Throw some in the glove compartment of your car.  Have extras in your briefcase.  Always keep spares around, because you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and your best first impression comes with a strong handshake and a professional business card.

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Lessons learned:

1.  You are starting over.  Your network from your military career is not the one that will get you into the corporate sector, so you need to start getting out and meeting people.

2.  The expected token of networking is the business card.  Get professional looking and feeling cards made professionally as soon as possible.

3.  Avoid military “-isms” on your card such as callsigns, rank, Military Occupational Specialty, etc.  You are selling yourself as a future employee, not a servicemember.

The other side of transition: finding a job part 1

Posted by Mike Grice on

The time has come.  You have made your decision to leave the military and now the reality of the whole situation hits you right between the eyes like a mallet on a croquet ball: you have to go get a job.

The military is a tough profession.  It is rife with conflict and stress and danger; anyone who finds wearing a uniform and easy way of life isn’t doing it right.  The hours are long if you are lucky enough to be at your home duty station and the deployments are even longer as Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines find themselves shuffled off to distant parts of the planet for months – and in some cases years – at a time.  It is a truly arduous line of work.

The one thing that military folks are not fighting for, however, is their paycheck.  As long as they are in the service they will receive their pay and allowances.  Unless they do something very wrong or fail to meet promotion requirements they can stay in until they decide to leave.  Generally speaking they cannot be fired; they may be relieved from their specific duties but they still are employed as they move to another job.  Unlike the civilian world there is rarely an existential crisis that finds military personnel wondering where or when their next paycheck will arrive.  Sure, they move around from job to job and from base to base, but always within the context of continued employment and service within the Department of Defense.

Then comes the day when your next job is not assigned to you by some faceless bureaucrat in Washington.  On that day you realize that the next job for you is the one that you find.

Gulp.

That can be very daunting!  I have previously posted about the Transition Assistance programs that the services offer, so I won’t go into detail on those programs.  What I will start going into detail about, however, is the process that you will need to follow in order to take advantage of your military experience and leverage it into finding a job, and who knows?  Maybe even a new career!

Too many people leave the service with the unfounded expectation that there are jobs-a-plenty out in the civilian sector and that companies are foaming the mouth to hire veterans.  After all, who has greater leadership skills and management expertise than someone who has led their peers and subordinates into combat or supervised teams of highly trained people and maintained millions of dollars worth of equipment?  Which firms wouldn’t want to fill their plants and factories and businesses with former military professionals and make them into run like little armies?

The answer to that is pretty simple.  Almost none of them.

The cold hard truth about the business world is that companies exist to do one thing and one thing only; they are there to make money.  Sure there are nonprofit companies that aim to accomplish other things, but they need money to be able to meet their lofty goals.  The coin of the realm, if you will pardon the pun, is the mighty dollar.

If you cannot show to a potential employer how you will help them make more money or how you can assist them with saving money then they really don’t need you.

It is quite a shocking realization to learn that no matter what your skills are, no matter how many deployments you made or how many medals you have nobody on the outside really cares.  Sure, they are respectful of your service and sacrifice and will gladly buy you a drink, but they are not going to put you on the payroll unless you can show how you can add value to their firm.

This is why it is critically important to do a couple of things before you start heading out into the job market.  Here are the most crucial things that you MUST do before you start jobseeking:

1.  Get over yourself.  You have served your country and you have gone places and done things that civilians will never experience.  Guess what- if they want to hear all about the military and what it is like to serve they will go to the movies.  You need to move on from being Colonel Soandso or Sergeant Highspeed.  I guarantee you will never find a good job if you cannot let go of your military past.  Employers want to hire you for what you will do for them, not who you used to be.

2.  Figure out what you want to do.  This is not as easy as it sounds.  I strongly recommend that you find the time to sit down for a few uninterrupted hours and really analyze what you would like to do with yourself now that you are out of the military.  Ask yourself a few questions, such as where do I see myself in five years?  Ten?  What am I good at?  Do I want to find work in the areas I am familiar with, or do I want to strike out in a totally new direction?

3.  Start planning.  Now that you have an idea of which direction you would like to steer your ship you need to chart a course.  What companies are doing work that interests me?  Are they hiring?  Do I need to get some specialized training or education in order to pursue those goals?

Once you have worked through these three points you will be much more ready to start looking for a job.  In my next post we will focus on step 2: figuring out what to do.

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Lessons Learned:

1.  Getting a job once you get out is not easy.  It takes work, and you will waste a lot of time and suffer from some pretty significant blows to your ego if you think that the civilian world owes you something for your service.  They don’t.  If you want a job, you have to get out there and earn it.

2.  You need to do three things before your first interview:  Get over yourself, figure out what you want to do, and start planning.  We will talk about these in greater detail in future posts.

3.  Take a deeeeeeeep breath.  It’s going to be OK.  Trust me.

So now what?

Posted by Mike Grice on

So there you are, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in your hand and the rest of your life in front of you.  You have made the decision to hang up your combat boots and get out of the service.  What you have not decided yet, though, is what to do next.  You stir your coffee, look out the window, and ask yourself “so now what?”

It is a great question, and you probably don’t have a truly great answer for it.  In many ways leaving the military puts you in the same position you were in when you graduated high school or college: the world lays before you with prospects to go in pretty much any direction you choose.  Which path is the one you want to take?

There are many possibilities.  You can go back to school, get a job, move back in with your parents, or become a hermit.  For the first time in years it is a choice that no senior officer or NCO will make for you.  So what are you gonna do?

Contrary to popular belief it is unlikely that you will be able to find a porch to sit on for the remainder of your days, unless you are retiring to a cabin in the middle of the mountains and plan on living on whatever you can grow, catch, or hunt yourself.  The retirement benefits aren’t that generous.  You are going to need to supplement your well earned but meager pension.

What if you are just getting out after a hitch or two?  Finding the retirement porch is probably decades in the future, so you need to find something to do until the rocking chair becomes your retirement throne.

So, back to the question: now what?

There are two common paths that people leaving the military take.  They generally either go back to school or find a job.  Many vets, like me, end up doing both at the same time as they work their way through college or graduate school.  Regardless of which path you take, however, you are ultimately going to end up back in the market for a job, if not a new career.  That is what the next string of posts will focus on: getting a job.

Despite what you may have heard, you can find employment after you get out despite the sour economy.  It isn’t easy, though.  There is no magical job fairy that sprinkles you with sparkly guaranteed-employment dust.  There are opportunities, though, but it takes some work to take advantage of them.

How long has it been since you wrote your resume?  How about a cover letter?  Have you had any experience being interviewed for a job?  What kind of skills can you show to a potential employer?  What do you want to do?

These questions and many more will be answered as we look into post-military employment….