Building Your Resume / Best Practices
Step One: Build an extended document detailing all your experiences, skills, interests, projects you have worked on, achievements, education and training courses and seminars attended, and you should keep it always up-to-date. You can call this document the master copy resume, the extended resume or the experience inventory or just call it whatever you want, just remember that the purpose is to have all your details written and documented for two main reasons:1- This document will be a great reference and tracking tool. Since this document is more than a brief resume, it will contain all the things you have done throughout your career in addition to some other personal information like interests and hobbies. This way you can track your progress over time, you can assess where you are really strong and where your weaknesses exist, in order to plan for future self-improvement and enhancement in certain aspects.
2- You will have comprehensive source of information about yourself for extracting your resume from, and this lead us to step two:
Step Two: Extracting the resume. You should have no standard resume, never. Each resume you send should be different, it should be fine-tuned in order to reflect specifically what the employer wants or expects. Sometimes, some interests can be removed or added as needed. You might need to rearrange or re-rank your skills. Some irrelevant duties done throughout your career might need to be removed as it might lead to the misconception of being either over-qualified or your experience might be thought of as too-general and thus, irrelevant.
Your resume is what will market your application to a certain job, you should always keep in mind, that each employer should be communicated with differently based on their strategies, approach and needs. You should do your best to convey to employers that you understand their needs and your qualifications are the best to match it.