What you must know about creating your resume using MS Word (Part 2)

We discussed everything you need to know about creating an MS Word resume, up to the resume summary section with the previous edition of this article. Today, we will take a look at how you should tackle the sections that follow the resume summary. This article will cover all the writing and formatting tips you should know to create the following sections for your resume:

• Skills
• Professional experience
• Education
• Additional resume sections

Creating the Skills section of your resume

You didn’t have to create any headers for the contact section, title, and professional summary of your resume. We will start including headers from the skills section. To create a resume skills section that stands out:

• Type “Skills” on a separate line of its own
• Choose the formatting and color you want your heading to have
• Follow the same style you had in previous sections for the contents of the skills section
• List your professional skills under the heading
• Ensure you don’t exceed 12 skills
• Make sure that your list has a good mix of hard and soft skills

Writing the perfect Professional Experience section for your resume

This will be the longest and the most important section of your resume. It’s vital that you plan out this section before you start typing away. Ensure that you use the chronological resume format when you write your work experience. Begin with your most recent work experience and go backward.

There are certain guidelines for you to follow when laying out each work experience under the section:

Start with the section heading. Follow the same style of the skills section to highlight the “Work Experience” heading

• For each entry, add your job title first
• Mention the company name and location (city and state)
• Include the timeframe of your job there. Use the MM/YYYY format
• Use 4 to 6 bullet points for each position title to highlight your best achievements
• Always start your bullets with an action verb
• Use the “Skill + Context + Result” formula to successfully lay out your achievements

It is wise to only talk about the last 10-15 years of your professional experience. The best resumes display only 10 years of experience. However, you can mention your previous job titles under a separate “Early Career Experience” section if they are related to the job you are applying for.

Compiling a strong Education section for your resume

Include your education section after the career summary. The education section usually contains information on the education, professional development, and credentials of a candidate. Don’t include graduation dates unless you graduated recently. When listing your degrees, always spell out the acronyms. Master of Business Administration rather than MBA would be easily parsed by the ATS. Acronyms can be included within parentheses. Each education entry must consist of the degree/course/credential title, relevant dates, awarding body, and a brief description of what you learned there. The description can be omitted when you have more professional experience.

Framing additional resume sections

You can follow the same style and format to lay out your other resume sections. Use a relevant header that describes the content and be concise with your descriptions.

Things you should consider when formatting headers

After you’ve completed writing the content of your resume, you can start editing how it looks. You can customize and play with the headers of your resume sections.

• Enlarge the font size of each header
• Use bold to help them stand out
• Use the shading option to add color to the shading behind the header
• Ensure the colors you use won’t affect the readability of your resume
• You can use borders above or below your headers to help them stand out more
• Ensure that all headers are consistent in their formatting

Voila! Now you have a cool resume you made yourself from scratch. All there’s to do is to save it in an appropriate file format and start sending it out!