writing a resume for your first job

How To Write A Resume For Your First Job

In this article, we’re going to be talking about how to write a resume for your very first job. So if you’re putting together your resume for the very first time, it’s really important that you understand the sort of three key ingredients that go into every single resume you put together for pretty much the rest of your career. And the three ingredients are your skills, your experiences, and your achievements for pretty much any job you go for the rest of your career.

The person reading your resume is going to look at what you can do, what you’ve done, and what you’ve achieved in all of your previous roles to determine if you are the most attractive candidate for that particular role. But you might be going for your first job. So what do you do in that particular instance?

Don’t have experience? You want to mine your personal experience

Well, this is where you really need to mind your life experience to find things that you can add into your resume to give the person reading it really a perspective on who you are and the value that you can bring to their particular business.

So if you’re in high school putting together your first resume or you’ve just finished high school, you’re in your early twenties, you want to look at all the areas of your life where you’ve built skills or had achievements and include those in your resume. They could be your academic grades, they could be any sporting achievements that you’ve had.

They could be particular projects or achievements you’ve had or groups you’ve contributed to outside of school. Like if you’re in the scouts or if in school you join the debating class, or if you coached a sporting team, whatever it is.

You want to demonstrate areas where you’ve built skills

Anything that you’ve contributed to a group where you’ve built skills, whether it’s resilience, time management, project management, leadership, maybe you’ve done some volunteering outside of school, that’s a great thing to include in your resume because it shows the person reading it a lot about who you are, your values and the skills that you can bring again to their particular company for the role that you’re going for.

And I understand it might be difficult to actually find these bits of experience to put in your resume, but I guarantee you there’s more there to put in your resume to include than you think there is.

An example of someone who I’ve worked with

For example, I worked with a girl called Jasmine who was having trouble finding work about one to two years ago.

So coming out of Covid, she was having a lot of anxiety about getting back into the workforce, but she was looking to refresh her resume and really get back out there and find a new role. And she was quite young in her career, but she knew that she really wanted to find a job somewhere in retail. And we found out that she really loves animals. She’s really into pets. She’s got several pets, she’s always had cats and dogs in the house. So we determined that getting a job at a pet store would actually be a great fit for her.

But when we looked at her resume, there was nothing about pets featured on there. It was all about other jobs she’d had working at Subway or KFC or whatever it was, which was good experience to have. And also, she had a couple of certificates that she’d acquired as well along the way, but it was nothing in there regarding pets. So when we got chatting about it, it actually turned out she’d done some volunteering with different pet shelters, with pet grooming places, but that experience wasn’t even included on her resume, despite the fact that it was the most relevant set of experience for the job that she was going to be going for.

But because it was volunteering and not paid work, she didn’t think that it was going to be relevant to list on a resume. But if you work at a pet store, you’re looking to hire someone and you see someone who’s got experience working at KFC or Subway, which is food, essentially, food service companies versus someone who’s got experience working with animals, working with pet shelters, who’s got pets, whose lifestyle and personal hobbies and interests actually alive with the pet industry that’s going to make that person stand out as an attractive candidate for that role far more than the other person.

So when you’re putting your resume together for the very first time, go through your life experience to date, whether it’s school, sporting clubs, hobbies, interests outside of school, and find ways to tailor your personal skills and experiences in a way that align with the specific criteria, the key selection criteria of the job you’re going for.

The most important tip I can give you for building a great resume for the rest of your career is making sure that you tailor it and customize it for the specific role and for the specific business that you’re applying for.

Leave a Comment