Blog Post: MBA RESUME

Recently, I had the pleasure of coaching Executive MBA candidates on resume preparation. I really enjoyed the event and consider it an honor to have been invited to participate in the Resume and Interview Clinic. I met with several MBA candidates to critique their resumes based on what recruiters and HR professionals are looking for in an employee. I reviewed numerous resumes and found a common thread in both the format and ordering of almost all of the resumes. I suspected that the students had been instructed by their professors on how to prepare a resume, so I asked one of the students and he  confirmed my suspicions.

The problem was that all of the resumes listed the candidates education first. I hate to disagree with college professors, but I am afraid I must. All of the students I met with had both undergraduate degrees and 7 to 10 years of hands-on managerial work experience. These are prerequisites to being accepted into the Executive MBA program. As a general rule of thumb education is listed first for undergraduate students with less that three years of professional work experience. With three or more years professional work experience education moves underneath Professional Experience.

The hard fact is that employers make hiring decisions based on buying motivators. Being an MBA candidate is certainly a positive, but in and of itself is not the reason an employer will hire you. You should begin your resume with a title that clearly indicates your career history and/or job target. Next, you should include a Summary of Qualifications that serves as your value statement to a potential employer (it is quite exceptable to write MBA candidate as part of your value statement).

Following your value statement should be a list of Core Competencies, in other words, key skills you bring to the table. These key skills can be found in the job descriptions you are applying for. Identify the skill sets that you possess which are most commonly found in the types of positions you seek, and then adopt these as your Core Competencies.

The top 1/3 of your resume is the visual center, meaning that this is where the employer's eye naturally falls across the document, so it only makes sense that you would take advantage of this and REALLY, REALLY market yourself in this section of the resume. That being said it can be very difficult to be objective about yourself. Most job seekers don't know where to draw the line between bragging and modesty, between what's redundant and what's not, and between what's impactful and what's not. There are Certified Professional Resume Writers that are experts in these areas and can assist you in creating a dynamic marketing tool that will result in an excellent return on investment. Keep in mind that everyday your unemployed your losing money...