A Quick Two-Step Guide to List Your Skills on a Resume

A Quick Two-Step Guide to List Your Skills on a ResumeA Quick Two-Step Guide to List Your Skills on a ResumeTwo Steps to List Your Skills on a ResumeListingyourskills on a resumeis no rocket science. Most people simply list their skills and leave it at that. Still,in spite of itsrelative simplicity, you need to get the basics right. How you present your skills on a resume is tied closely to how you decide to structure your resume as a whole. Well show you how to present your skills on a resume like a champ.When Should You Emphasise Your Skills on a Resume instead of Experience?If youve ever written a resume in your life, youre probably quite familiar with the chronological resume style. Although this format fits the needs of most people, there are cases when using it would be ill-advised.Are youa fresh graduate with no experience to speak of? A chronological resume will make your lack of experience jarring - without letting you showcase the useful abilities you might already have.Ar e youtrying to switchcareers? A chronological resume wont let you out of the box of your previous professional experiences. At the same time, it wont give yo space to highlight your transferrable skills.Multiple roles at a single company? A chronological resume wouldnt make justice to the diversity of skills youve acquired.Do you rely heavily on your portfolio? A chronological resume would probably end up looking like a complete mess, as your professional history is probably not structured around stable jobs.Is therea gap in your employment? A chronological resume will bring attention to this fact instead of emphasising the wealth of skills you had acquired before.In all of these cases, experts recommend using a functional resume instead, as it emphasises your skills and abilities over a chronological career progression. It highlights what you can offer to a company, regardless of your career history.The main drawback of a functional resume is that some recruiters will automatically assume that youre hiding something by choosing to use this resume format. In the end, however, it all comes down to how effective it is at convincing potential employers that you really have the skills necessary for getting the job done.Two Steps to List Your Skills on a ResumeA functional resume revolves around its skills section. Yet, since functional resume is less commonly used, few candidates know how to write their skills section well.The premise sounds childishly uncomplicated - write a section where you list your skills on a resume. As obvious as it sounds, things can get a bit tricky once you start writing. For instance, is strong work ethic a skill or a strength? You should know the difference.Skills are things you learn through effort and experience, like being fluent in Spanish or being good at SEO marketing.Strengths are your natural personality traits you acquire over time. These might include the aforementioned strong work ethic or good communications skills. You pr obably know them under the label soft skills.Your skills section should mostly include hard skills. Once youve put your hard skills on a resume and did it well, its no longer necessary to explicitly mention soft skills. After all, if you show youre good at programming in C, it becomes quite obvious your computer skills are excellent. In any case, you can mention soft skills if theyre specific to the position.Step 1 Decide Which of Your Skills You Want to HighlightWhen it comes to showcasing your skills on a resume, its crucial that you highlight the right ones. This is a crucial part of tailoring your resume to each job position youre applying for.Make a list of keywords. Carefully reread the job description and look for skills that are required for the position. This will give you a list of keywords that will help you structure your skills section as well as let your resume pass through Applicant Tracking Software that recruiters use to weed out weak candidates.Match your skills to the position youre applying for. Now take a look at your own skill platzdeckchen and see where it overlaps with the list youve just made. The closer your set of skills matches the skills necessary for the job, the better your chances are for getting the job.If you dont have a skill that is absolutely essential for performing well at the given job, dig into your past experience. Try to come up with some examples that can demonstrate that youd be able to perform the skill or acquire it very quickly. At the same time, even if you dont have every skill in the job description, its not critical. Simply craft your skills section to best reflect what the job requires.Step 2 Support Each Skill Category on a Resume with Examples and AccomplishmentsEmployers dont respond well to arbitrary lists of nouns and adjectives. Look at it this way If someone told you about what a fantastic snowboarder he or she is, would you believe it? Probably not, as it sounds very much like bragging. But what if t heyd also tell you about a snowboarding competition they won or about how they go snowboarding every weekend? As Beyonc says Dont bore me, show meChoose 3-4 major skill categories to serve as subheadings. This is to structure your skills section into something that will look sleek and organised. Name it something appropriate, dont try to get too creative with this. For instance, if you happen to speak multiple languages, group them under the subheading Languages (no kidding). See the example below.Use bullet points to list your individual skills and accomplishments. Once you have the subheadings set up, fill them with bullet points and always be specific. For instance, dont simply say that you have excellent writing skills. Opt for something like Experience with writing business and funding proposals, pitch documents and advertising copy, as seen below.On the side note, you dont have to include job titles or names of the companies you worked for. That belongs to the (now quite light weight) experience section.Resume ExampleEXAMPLE Skills on a ResumeWriting and CommunicationDegree with an emphasis on clarity and structure in written and oral communication.Wrote blog posts, news features, technical documents and marketing copies.Former editor-in-chief of the university newspaper.Experience writing business and grant proposals, pitch documents and advertising copy.Translated documents and interpreted conversations in Spanish, German and English.Creative and Analytical ThinkingAnalysis of audience, purpose and style of documents.Strategic choice of wording, tone, format and source of information.Ability to take fact-based materials and make them interesting.Software and Social MediaKnowledge of social media, blogging and digital marketing.Experience with Google Wave, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress and Blogspot.Managed social media accounts with more than 30.000 followers in total.Your skills section has to play nicely with the rest of your resumeIn the end, even if the skills section is going to be central to your resume, its only the beginning. Learn how to write a powerful resume here. If youre a student or a fresh graduate, you mightwant to refer toour college student resume guide. Youll find therean exhaustive tutorial on how to write a fantastic functional resume. Good luckShare Your Feedback or Ideas in the Comments

How Honest Should You Be in an Exit Interview

How Honest Should You Be in an Exit Interview How Honest Should You Be in an Exit Interview The decision to give your notlageice is a difficult one to make. While no job is perfect, there are surely things you will be sad to leave behind. Your exit interview serves as an opportunity to share feedback andhelp thecompany find ways to improve.But beware The questions asked during an exit interview may stir some negative feelings youve been keeping inside. Its important to offer your honest feedback,but you must resist the urge to point fingers.The best approach is to stick to the facts. Speak from your own personal opinionabout what youve experienced firsthand. The opinions you share should be your own and not meant to represent the consensus of other employees.Youll be asked a range of questions during your exit interview. The HR representative will usually start by asking you how long you were looking for a job and how your new job compares to the one youre leaving. Additionally, yo u can expect a few questions on what you think the company is doing well andwhere it could stand to improve.The most challenging questions will be the ones concerning your manager. Most employees dont leave companies - they leave managers. If this is the case for you, then questions about your manager can quickly get personal if you arent vigilant.Here are a few questions you can expect to be asked about your managerHow would you describe your relationship with your direct supervisor?How did your supervisor handle any complaints or grievances you may have had?Did you speak with your supervisor about your career goals? Why or why not? What was the outcome?Remember, this is not a forum to unleash a stream of complaints. Be measured in your responses. You can easily share that it wasnt the relationship you had hoped for without placing blame. For exampleOur relationship wasnt as close as I had hoped. I was really hoping for a mentor-like relationship, and that just didnt materialize.v s.She really didnt take any interest in what I was doing. She was always quick to give negative feedback, and she never invested in helping me improve what she saw as deficiencies in my skills.You dont want to burn bridges. Its important to know that your exit interview lives in your personnel file. It is not confidential. If your particular circumstances give you any reason to doubt your ability to stay calm and cordial, consider skipping the exit interview altogether.A version of this article originally appeared on theAtrium Staffing blog.Michele Mavi isAtrium Staffings resident career expert.

Reducing Healthcare Business Risk While Increasing Value

Reducing Healthcare Business Risk While Increasing ValueReducing Healthcare Business Risk While Increasing ValueReducing Healthcare Business Risk While Increasing Value Girotra and Serguei Netessine, authors of The Risk-Driven Business Model Four Questions That Will Define your Company (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014)Large general hospitals face a wide range of risks, the stakes of which are dramatically higher than those faced in fruchtwein other industries. The risks fall into four main categories1)There is the purely medical risk of contagion associated with the interaction of the many patients and procedures that a general hospital handles. For example, infectious patients can kill relatively healthy ones.About a hundred thousand people die every year in the United States from infections acquired inside the hospital. Most of these are spread through ventilation systems or caused by improper sanitization and disinfecting procedures. Much of this risk arises from the decision to service any and all patients in the same facility.2)Many information risks result from variable, highly unpredictable demand. Emergency rooms, for example, can be overwhelmed by flu epidemics, industrial or highway accidents, or multiple gunshot victims, all on top of the steady flow of uninsured patients who come to the ER for routine medical care.3)Information flow in a general hospital can be a challenge, especially around shift changes, leading to characteristic inefficiencies. For example, unless accurate patient status information is exchanged between departing and arriving nurses, elements of care can either fall through the cracks or be duplicated needlessly (sometimes dangerously).4)Finally, incentive-alignment inefficiencies sometimes come into play when doctors and others make decisions motivated by reasons other than the patients best interest.New Approachs to Walk-In CareNone of these problems exist at Laastari Lhiklinikka, a chain of small Finnish clinics located in shopping malls and other densely populated areas. The clinics pursue a focused what strategy by treating a limited set of the most common illnesses, including allergies, colds, sore throats, flu, and simple infections.They also administer the most common vaccinations. Depending on a patients needs, the fee for a visit might range between 25 and 45 approximately $33 $59 US Dollars (the same services would likely cost 100 $132 at a Finnish general hospital). Clinics are open seven days a week, require no appointment, and claim to have earned 100 percent customer satisfaction.Patient experiences are more predictable in the clinics, where there is lower risk than in a general hospital of coming into contact with virulent infectious diseases. Laastari Lhiklinikka saves on labor costs by having nurses, not physicians, deliver services and it saves on infrastructure because the clinics dont need expensive diagnostic equipment. (Patients whose needs go beyond what the clinics can provide are, of course, referred to a full-service hospital.)All procedures take ten to fifteen minutes of provider time. This makes workloads predictable and long lines unlikely, which in turn enables staff utilization to approach its theoretical maximum. Laastari Lhiklinikka is neither unique nor the first such health-care venture to realize the risk-reducing benefits of focus.The US-based MinuteClinicchain has been around since 2000, offering a similar list of limited services provided by nurse practitionersor physician assistants at roughly six hundred centers in CVS pharmacy stores.According to the latest data, MinuteClinics operating costs were 40 percent to 80 percent lower than in general hospitals, yet the entire chain of clinics broke even in 2010 and has continued to grow (CVS Caremark acquired the chain in 2006).Offering mora than Walk-In CareFocused health-care approaches can do more than administer vaccines or treat cold and flu symptoms.A small Canadian hospital called Should icehas done nothing but repair abdominal hernias since 1945. Its focus on one particular surgery has allowed it to deliver superior quality at a far lower cost than a general hospital could ever achieve. Yet it offers its doctors and nurses higher salaries than do other hospitals.Although Shouldice is a private hospital in the mainly government-run Canadian medical system, the government happily pays for Shouldice surgeries because they are less expensive than elsewhere.And there is a steady stream of cash-paying US patients who are regularly drawn to Canada by Shouldices reputation for quality. (Shouldice, after seventy years on its own, was acquired in September 2012 by Toronto-based Centric Health.)Since hernias are neither life-threatening nor thought to be especially complicated, they are often performed by general surgeons. However, since Shouldice operates only on hernias, over time it has perfected a quick and efficient production-line approach.There is just one basic proced ure, and Shouldice has standardized it the way Henry Ford standardized automobile assembly a hundred years ago.Moreover, because each doctor performs hundreds of procedures every year, individual surgeons attain high proficiency very quickly. The quality of patient outcomes is consequently also high, with customer satisfaction to match.Offering Quality Healthcare for LessHernia repair is far from being the most complicated procedure a focused hospital can perform. In 2011, The Economist honored Indian cardiac surgeon Devi Shetty with an award in the field of geschftsleben process innovation.The award cited Shettys Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospitalin Bangalore for reducing health-care costs using mass-production techniques. His hospital performs more heart operations at a lower cost and a lower mortality rate than leading American hospitals.Narayana Hrudayalaya employs forty-two cardiac surgeons who do more than three thousand beipass surgeries per year, along with many other less demand ing cardiac procedures.Shetty, like Shouldice, drew inspiration from automobile assembly lines. Japanese companies reinvented the process of making cars, Shetty told the Wall Street Journal. Thats what were doing in healthcare. What healthcare needs is process innovation, not product innovation.We are not suggesting that general hospitals are a thing of the past. Many patients suffer from a number of ailments in combination and are best served by large, multi-specialty institutions. But focus can be a powerful strategic lever in any number of industries.Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from The Risk-Driven Business Model Four Questions that Will Define Your Company. Copyright 2014. Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.Author BiosKaran Girotra is Professor of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD. Karans main teaching and research interests are in the areas of entrepreneurship, business model audit, design and innovation.Karans research has examined the substance and process of business model innovation. Karan routinely designs and leads workshops on the generation, selection and refinement of new business opportunities, for participants ranging from aspiring entrepreneurs to large corporations. He is winner of the best professor in the MBA program award, runner-up for the best professor in the executive MBA program and four-time winner of the deans award for excellence in teaching.Serguei Netessine is The Timken Chaired Professor of Global Technology and Innovation at INSEAD and the Research Director of the INSEAD-Wharton alliance. Prior to joining INSEAD in 2010, he has been a faculty member at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.Prof. Netessine received BS/MS degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology and, after working for Motorola and Lucent Technologies, he also received MS/Ph.D. degrees in Operations Management from the University of Rochester.