KEY TIPS TO WRITING A GOOD HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT RESUME

The holidays are coming up and you may be thinking to yourself it’s probably a good time to get your first job and see what working really is like. Whether you’ve just finished your HSC or still in high school, the summer break is a great time for you to try something new, otherwise you might just end up feeling really bored with nothing to do. So without further ado, here are three key tips to get your baby career started.

Emphasise your extracurricular activities

You probably also have been looking at a few job ads already and realised they keep asking for previous work experience, but you have none! So what do you do? Just because you’ve never worked before doesn’t mean you can leave your resume blank! Thus, think back to what extracurricular activities such as sport or volunteering you have done before. You may feel like you’ve done none, but trust me, once you have a think, everyone has a few (and if you really have none, it’s time to get started on them!). Additionally, if you’ve gotten a few awards at school, add them in as well for a little extra spice. Rather than just describe what they were about, it’s important to emphasize and write down the skills you demonstrated to get the awards and during the extracurricular activities, such as leadership or team work.

Also, just because a job ad may say they want someone with “industry experience” it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it a try. There’s no pain in trying at all. I’ve known many that have gotten a job with little experience in that field at all, but what they did was tailor their resume to the job which leads me onto my next point.

 

Tailor your resume to different job positions

Every type of job requires a different set of skills. Thus, if you’re looking into many different types of jobs from working in a clothing store to a pharmacy to admin work, it’s important to have many different resumes written for each type rather than just a generic one for all. They don’t have to be completely different, but you should change a few key words and phrases in each one to fit what you think the different employers would find desirable in an employee. That is, you want to be able to highlight the key skills that are more important to this particular job in your resume rather than just write everything down. Getting a job requires you to stand out from the crowd, and it’s much harder to do that if you use one resume for every single job opening.

Make it concise

No employer wants to read 5 pages about you. You ain’t that interesting. They probably also get a tonne of applications as well. Basically just keep it simple and address the key points about yourself. Maximum, two pages! If they have more questions, they can ask you later on once you have already impressed them in the phone call (hopefully!).

Jack Zheng | N° 61