0:00:02.7 Professor Walden: Alright, good evening everyone. It is time. So hey NP collective and new friends.
0:00:10.5 Speaker 1: It’s time to go live. We have gotten your questions, we have received all of your questions about the resumes, and we saw that you guys watch the video, we saw all of the watching that was happening, so we know that you guys did your homework and that you were looking at the videos of Amanda and her teachings. And we’re very happy about that, and we’re also super excited to bring her back to us to kind of answer some of these questions that you guys have, so I’m just gonna let you know that we will bring Amanda on and she will just start answering those questions, I’m gonna be here in that support role and piggy-backing off of what she’s saying, also, if you have any questions, as we kind of go through this and you wanna throw them in the chat, please do so, and we will grab them and we will answer them accordingly. But as always protective of your time, so we’re gonna go ahead and bring Amanda back in. Hey Amanda.
0:01:19.0 Amanda: Hello. Thanks for having me back.
0:01:21.4 S1: Thank you. We had lots of interest on your video, as we were kind of just reviewing things, we saw, lots of the students went back, took lots of notes, they really loved your presentation, so I appreciate you coming back to us and kind of answering these questions.
0:01:40.7 Amanda: Of course, if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s resumes and cover letters are a topic that people have a lot of questions about, not everybody, not many people feel comfortable and confident doing so, so I’m happy to help provide that feedback as needed.
0:02:00.3 S1: Absolutely, I do have one question before we begin, and launch into those questions, but I did not prep you for that, but I was just curious how you got started in doing resumes.
0:02:14.1 Amanda: Oh, good question. I was in a Facebook group one day, as we are sometimes. [chuckle] One day almost three years ago, and it was a nurse practitioner Facebook group, and I saw someone posting for a question about a resume, asking for some sort of feedback or help formatting and I threw mine, a picture of it in the comments. And it got a ton of feedback like, Oh wow. How did you learn how to do this? And it was always something that I was good at, so I didn’t realize other people struggled with it, and it was… If you ever see something and then you keep seeing it over and over after you see it that first time, that’s how it was for me. I kept seeing all these questions about resumes in the Facebook groups, and that’s when I knew that I probably had a business idea on my hands and I had been looking for a business idea, I had been looking for a reason to stay home more with my kids, so that was kind of the impetus moment that got me started.
0:03:15.4 S1: I love it. So I too like resumes, I do not enjoy doing them. [laughter]
0:03:23.2 Amanda: Fair enough.
0:03:24.0 S1: I have done my own, I have done my mother’s friends and my mother’s and things like that, and they always get lots of hits afterwards, but I don’t enjoy it. So I’m glad to have found you and found someone who enjoys doing it, but also once you love doing something, you kind of go down the rabbit hole and you learn everything and all there is to do it in order to be better at it, so I’m glad you are here with us doing that. Alright, so we’re gonna launch right…
0:03:56.2 Amanda: Yeah and actually I…
0:03:58.0 S1: Go ahead.
0:04:00.8 Amanda: Well, I was just gonna say, I enjoy teaching about resumes moreso than I like actually doing them, so this type of forum is perfect.
0:04:07.7 S1: Perfect, perfect. We’ll exploit that a little bit tonight then. Alright. So we’re gonna launch right into the questions. And so, like we said, we sent the questions that you guys sent to us and Amanda has them. So take it away.
0:04:25.3 Amanda: Yeah, so let’s start off. There were some questions, there were some themes, so I’d love to start off with kind of the themes that I noticed in the questions, the first one being about length, I think that’s a really common question that is kind of out there, how long should my resume be? There were some comments, I feel like my resume is too long, it’s too long and wordy, these are quotes from your responses… “It’s too lengthy.” “Should it be more than one page?” So I’d love to go over that to start. And there are no rules. Okay, first of all, there’s no resume police, no one’s gonna come after you if you do something, something differently, but I do recommend if you are looking for a clinical position, as many of you are, that you try to keep your resume to no more than two pages, maximum, and if you can keep it to one page because that’s… Because you’ve included everything necessary, then great, but what you wanna make sure is that everything that you include has really earned its space on the page.
0:05:34.0 Amanda: So you wanna have a really critical eye of, Am I including fluff? Am I including anything redundant? Am I just regurgitating the nursing process under my job descriptions, or is everything that I’m including very valuable that speaks to my experience and my relevant experience for this future role? One of the more difficult things to do is to be a new grad NP and write a resume that’s for the NP position when all you have to feature is your nursing experience, it can feel like that’s not enough or that you’re showcasing the wrong thing. But in that instance, what you wanna do is make sure that what you’re including are transferable skills, meaning you’re talking about the things that you did in your nursing positions that are going to enhance you as a provider.
0:06:32.2 Amanda: So I think that if you have lots and lots of years of experience or lots and lots of nursing positions, I would trim it down to just two pages by doing one of two things, You can either cut yourself off by time say, Okay, I’m going to include the previous 10 years of my work experience, or if you want to include farther back, but you don’t have room, you can include just the role and the employer and not do any bullet points, so that’s two ways to condense something that’s really long because if you have 10, 15, 20 plus years of nursing experience. That alone is gonna give you probably two pages plus, but you wanna have room for your clinical rotations, you wanna have room for those other things, so you have to be prudent with either your far back experience by cutting it out completely, or by not including any of the bullet points.
0:07:34.5 S1: So you just kind of mentioned it and you just kind of said it really quickly, but we do advocate for putting your clinical rotations on your resume when you are looking for your first position or that first or second, because you’re still fairly in that, that new stage and you need to kind of, for lack of a better word, fill out your resume.
0:08:01.0 Amanda: Yeah. Yeah.
0:08:02.1 S1: So we’re gonna do that. Okay guys, so you are putting your clinical rotations on your resume. Now also, and this kind of piggy-backs off of that one-page theory. I think that a lot of people get this from school, a lot of us go through our Career Services and they tell us only one page, so kind of like you said, you said, Cut it down to about two pages, but how do you feel about… Specifically our universities and it’s universal, so our universities that are out there going through those career services to initially get that first kind of resume started.
0:08:51.6 Amanda: Yeah, I think that if you have that service available to you, I don’t think that it hurts to take advantage of it, for sure. I would take it with a grain of salt and consider some other resources, whether it’s from me or someone else in the field of nursing and advanced practice nursing, so that you can get a feel for what that best practice is, ’cause usually the career centers that are associated with the universities are gonna tell you kind of universal best practices, and if I’ve learned one thing, part of the reason why I even kind of have a business is because there are nuances to our profession, in nursing and in advanced practice nursing, so I just encourage you to also consider incorporating those types of resources when you’re working on your final version.
0:09:41.0 S1: I agree. I and in counseling, lots of students, especially when I was at the university, I often found myself, because I was in the working world, I often found myself pushing back on what Career Services said because they do gear it towards fresh, new, just got my bachelor’s kind of setup, which is that one page setup, ’cause you generally don’t have much else, but like you said, there’s lots of nuances to us, and then I was teaching non-traditional students as well, so I found myself pushing back a lot on the resumes, because if you have experience, like she said, give yourself credit for what you’ve done, so if you have those 20-30 year experiences, you’ve got something in there that is definitely transferable to an NP world, and I need you to give yourself credit for what that is, and if you can’t figure it out, have someone like Amanda figure it out for you.
0:10:49.0 Amanda: Yeah, for sure. And even if that 20 years of experience is in a non-nursing field, even if you are a second degree NP, if you are a graduate entry student, shout out to other graduate entry students, I was one myself. That’s okay, and we can guarantee that you have transferable skills that you can include, but that’s the key, that’s what you wanna highlight, if your previous career is in computer programming, you’re probably not gonna talk about the different computer code languages that you know, but you might talk about how you approach executing a project or managing a project or working on a team or something like that, that you know is gonna be a skill set that you’ll use as an NP, so definitely give yourself credit even if it feels like you don’t have experience because the world is telling you that new grad NPs don’t have experience, you have experience in something, so that’s what you wanna flaunt.
0:11:47.0 S1: Yes. Absolutely. Alright, so with that being said, next question.
0:11:52.2 Amanda: Yes. Would you put previous certifications like PALS, TNCC, CCRN, etcetera, that you have held as a nurse on there, but are no longer current. So the answer to this specific question is no, because they are no longer current, I wouldn’t put anything that’s not current on your resume, you might… If you’re writing a lengthy academic CV, which we talked about before, there may be exceptions for that, but if you’re presenting your clinical resume, you wouldn’t include certifications that you no longer hold. Now, if you have current CCRN, TNCC, PALS, whatever it is, if it’s super relevant to the NP role that you wanna hold… Absolutely, if you are an acute care NP and you wanna work in an ICU and you have a CCRN certification, absolutely include that. You may or may not decide to keep it current as time goes on, you can kind of fill that out as you start practicing, but for the purposes of your resume, especially as a new grad, you wanna leverage that transferable expertise of critical care. And the same would go for oncology, if you have an OCM certification or emergency, you have a CEN, and you want to be working in those fields as an NP, I would absolutely feature those on your resume. If they’re current.
0:13:16.1 S1: Absolutely. If they’re current. Absolutely. So the idea… And that kind of goes back to what you were saying as in, let’s not add the fluff or let’s remove the fluff. So if they’re not current, if you don’t have current certifications, don’t add them because it looks like you are fluffing up your resume. As a former hiring manager, it is very obvious, and everything you said in that first lecture, when you said a hiring manager looks at your resume for 10 to 15 seconds. It’s very true. I can look at a resume still to this day because it is a skill that I learned… I can look at it to this day and just be like, Nope, that’s not who I’m looking for. And it’s a very quick thing. It’s very hard to articulate how that happens or why that happens, but if I had to, I could, but it is a very quick glance, and so you can see when people are adding things that don’t need to be added.
0:14:23.4 Amanda: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it sounds silly, but it’s really not because to speak of transferable skills, like when we evaluate patients, when we go through the triage process, whatever that looks like, whether you’re triaging in the emergency room or in the outpatient setting, we make those quick gut check, initial assessments of people, we’ve learned how to do that over time, and that’s kind of the analogous trait that hiring managers have, where they can look and they can say yes or no, the same way we can look at someone in our triage chair and say, sick or not sick, you know. So it’s definitely something to pay attention to, and the exception to that of not current things would be if you have something in progress, if your DNP is in progress or you have some sort of advanced…
0:15:11.6 S1: Can you just explain? How do we address this?
0:15:13.4 Amanda: Yeah, so you put it on your resume where it would go, so if it’s an educational degree, put it under education, and then you can either say, in progress or expected May 2021 or whatever, many of you, if you haven’t graduated yet, you’re going to be doing that with your current degree programs, so you’ll just put when it’s expected so that it’s very clear on your resume that you are a candidate for this role and it will be… The degree will be confirmed… Conferred at whatever date, and you can do the same thing under your licensure and certifications, so like your APRN license, if you haven’t taken your exam, you can put pending examination, so just for those things that are upcoming, just put whatever the status is right now, and then remember to go back and update it once that status changes.
0:16:05.1 S1: I always like to say that we don’t want to call attention when it is not necessary with dates. So for the exam, if we haven’t taken the exam quite yet and we are just kind of getting our resume together, don’t lock yourself into a date, ’cause things may change, you just don’t know, you may have a winter storm in Texas where your date gets cancelled, so like you said, pending examination, 2021 or whatever year that we are in, but again, not locking yourself into a specific month and day, and even sometimes… Not even a specific month, just kind of saying, I’m taking the exam this year pending 2021 and leaving it at that.
0:16:58.0 Amanda: Yeah. Yeah, I definitely agree. It can be helpful if you’re in the imminent job market because you’re graduating within the next few months, like you might put a season, so you might say that you’re graduating spring or summer, so that you kind of give that ballpark idea, so people know that you’re pretty much almost ready to go, they have some sort of comparison to the current time, but I agree, don’t lock yourself into saying, My exam is scheduled for this date for the reasons that you stated. I agree.
0:17:33.7 S1: Absolutely. So also really quickly, let’s address if you transferred schools or that kind of thing, because a lot of times folks will have… I’ve seen it on the resumes where they have multiple schools because they’ve transferred. How do you feel about that? And what should that look like?
0:17:54.3 Amanda: Yeah, I think you have a couple of options. It wouldn’t be wrong to only list the school where you’re getting… Where you’re finishing the degree from, I think it really depends on how much you’ve done, if you did prerequisites at a community college before… If you took anatomy and physiology before your NP program at a community college. I’m not sure that that necessarily needs to be on there, if you transferred mid-program or after a full semester or two of core classwork, then I think that you can list them out and then rather than putting a degree, you can talk about… You could say didactic coursework or something that specifies that, and then just making it clear that your… Which school is it that you’re actually completing the degree at and when you anticipate graduating.
0:18:55.0 S1: Okay, ’cause again, the only thing here is just to clean it all up. So clean up the resume. Alright, so with that being said, let’s go to the next one. What’s the next question?
0:19:04.8 Amanda: Yes. So next question was good, it said, “How do I get to the point that I am confident in my resume, to the point that it will grab someone’s attention?” And I wanted to focus on the first half of that question, which is, “How do I get to the point that I’m confident in my resume?” And I see this a lot. I don’t know if by nature, we are perfectionists, or we have impostor syndrome or whatever it is, type A.
0:19:32.6 Amanda: But I see a lot of people getting caught up in the minutia of resumes, and at some point, it needs to be good enough because you need to stop focusing on it, so that you can focus on your job search and the other things that are going to help you get a job, because like we talked about in the first lecture, your resume isn’t the only thing that’s getting you an interview or a job, it’s just a piece of the puzzle. So you wanna focus also on your strategy of how you are applying for jobs, of who you’re talking to in your network, all these other things. So it’s really easy to get caught up in to revising, revising, revising, and putting all your eggs in the resume basket.
0:20:15.5 Amanda: So I encourage you to try and recognize if you’re getting to that place and to bring in another set of eyes, whether that’s a peer, a mentor, a friend, a faculty member, someone who you can trust to lay eyes on it and give it a proofread and kind of see objectively, “Does this tell the story that you wanted to tell professionally?” And then once you’re done, be done with it. Of course, go back and make edits as you need to and update, but really decide to move on, especially if you’re procrastinating the other parts of your job search, because it happens and it’s easy to just kind of get caught up in that. So it’s hard to quantify when you’re ready to do that, but I say, make sure that you’re getting another set of eyes and then just recognize if you’re spending too much time on it, which is gonna be subjective, but hopefully, everyone has the insight to pick up on that.
0:21:20.4 S1: Right. It’s kind of like when folks ask me, are they ready for the exam? And I’m like, “Well, you’re never really ready.” You just kinda gotta go out there and you just kinda gotta study and you hope for the best and then you take the exam. It’s the same thing with the resume. And also, I am very much team A people, so if you are getting caught up in the mundaneness of just, “I’m always looking at it and I’m always tweaking it and I’m always adjusting it,” maybe this is not your ministry, maybe this is not for you. Pay someone who that is what they do, to have them just fix it for you so that you can be done with it and you can move on to the networking. Because again, a resume is a key piece, yes. But it’s not the only piece to that job search, and it’s really important that you spend as much time in those other pieces, as well as in your resume. So if you are putting the be all end all in your resume, you’re not doing it correctly. So give it to someone else, who is a specialist at it, who’s gonna make sure that it is correct for you and for the positions that you are looking for, so that you can focus on those interpersonal relationship skills that you have to use, in order to get that job.
0:22:45.6 Amanda: Definitely. I agree. And the next question is, actually, “Should I use a resume service?” So this is a good segue. And it’s really, it’s up to you. If you’re the type of person who is getting caught up in the perfectionism, then yes, consider hiring it out. If you’re someone who really couldn’t be bothered and you don’t wanna be involved in the process at all, you wanna be hands-off, absolutely hire it out. Personally, I think that the majority of people can write their own. And actually, on my website, the majority of my resources are directed to empower and educate people how to write their own. So you’ll see that I have templates, I have a tutorial program, and actually right now, I don’t write resumes for other people. That service of mine is on hold, so that I can do things like this and reach more people and teach them how to do it themselves. Because what I found was, many, many people who are coming to me to write their resume, had a resume that was excellent and they just needed… They weren’t confident, they needed permission, they needed validation and permission that they were good enough and ready, and that’s not necessarily a reason to hire it out. So it’s really…
0:24:10.5 Amanda: It’s different for everybody, but certainly, if you want nothing to do with it or you are really getting caught up in perfectionism or you really struggle with language or grammar or any of that, then certainly, a resume service.
0:24:29.7 S1: Or if you’re not getting the hits that you think you should be getting. So if you are submitting your resume and you are getting zero, zilch, nothing is happening, that is the time when it’s time to take a look and say, “Okay, wait. Is this me? Is it who I’m applying to or is it my resume that is not getting through the process?” And that’s when you start to take those. In addition to looking at what Amanda has said, if you don’t wanna be bothered. Those kind of things. But also if you’re just not getting the hits, you take a look, one, at who you’re applying to, and then two, “Is it my resume?” And like she said, let’s start with some templates first. You guys got time on your hands, let’s just be honest. You got a little bit of time, use the templates. Back in my day, we used the Word templates for your resume.
0:25:21.5 S1: I still remember, looking up on Word, and this is how I made my very, very first resume, high school days. But now, it’s come such a long way, use the templates that she has, apply your information so that it looks visually appealing, it’s hitting all of the marks that she says, and then boom, you can submit it and probably, I bet you’ll get some hits.
0:25:48.6 Amanda: Yeah, I think that’s… For most people, that’s really the best way to go is to do it on your own first, using whatever resources you have, and then re-evaluate and figure out if you’re not getting hit, “Is it a me problem? Is it a process problem or is it a resume problem?” and kind of give yourself credit and permission to do that first round on your own, before hiring it out, necessarily.
0:26:14.9 S1: Right, right. Okay, so next one. Do we have another question?
0:26:19.4 Amanda: Yes, so, “How to incorporate school training into the resume?” So we talked about including your clinical rotations. So if you’ve seen my templates, you’ll kind of see the layout, I recommend doing your summary at the top, and then your clinical rotations. And you don’t need to go into a ton of detail here. You can list the subject of the rotation, the location or the clinic, the number of hours, and if you want, you can include the preceptor and the dates. Now, for the most part, many of you are going to have pretty self-explanatory rotations, but if you had anything that was a specialty rotation or any skill sets that you feel that you’ve learned that were unique, you can certainly add a section either under that clinical or under all the clinical rotations, like a paragraph that speaks to your competencies, especially if you are in acute care NP and you had a lot of hands-on training, doing lines and LPs and intubations and all that hands-on skill stuff. That’s certainly something to feature somewhere, but for the most part, you can list just the details of the rotation on just two lines per rotation and leave a space in between.
0:27:39.1 S1: And it’s really important that if you are in your first or even second position, that as you are learning those new skills as well, that you update your resume accordingly, when you have some time, you have some free time, so that you don’t forget. And again, you make sure that you are giving yourself credit for the things that you have learned and the things that you were doing. So just take some time, one weekend or one night, while you’re sitting there watching TV, and just add in those skills so that you can just make sure, “Okay, I have this listed.” Even if you have to come back to it, you won’t at least forget that you’ve already made that list as well.
0:28:20.2 Amanda: Yeah. A couple of the next questions were similar, “New grad NP with 15 years of experience as a nurse.” The other one said 30 years, “How do I stand out? How should I incorporate this? How much should I include?” So I think we kind of addressed some of that at the beginning, talking about how much to include. Try to cut yourself off at two pages. If you have to, you can cut yourself off after a certain year, like a certain position, and that’s 10 or so years back and just omit everything else. Or you can take the bullet points away and just list the job locations and duties, without the bullet points. And again, I’ll reiterate that, what’s really important when you’re discussing these previous nursing positions, the best you can, give the context of the role, but also pull out and highlight, meaning, talk about… When I say that, I mean talk about. Talk about any of the skills or achievements or experiences you had in those roles, that you feel you will really take with you to your future NP job. And this is a place that you can personalize the resume as needed, especially if you’re applying to a variety of different roles. For example, if you’re applying to some specialty outpatient specialty or even inpatient specialty roles and you have some relevant experience as a nurse, you’re gonna want to talk about that a little bit.
0:29:50.5 Amanda: So that may be a situation where you might have a couple of versions of your resume, depending on which parts, which skills in your experience you want to highlight.
0:30:02.3 S1: So I think that’s a good, quick little segue into about those different versions of your resume. We always hear that and we definitely hear it outside of nursing, folks have different versions of resumes. Do we as nurse practitioners, need those different versions as well? And then touch a little bit on… Especially if we are applying to a big organization and how they have the recruiting systems and the word play that has to happen on the resume as well.
0:30:40.8 Amanda: Yeah, definitely. So you don’t necessarily need to have multiple versions unless you’re applying to really different roles. I’m talking primary care. Primary care versus inpatient specialty, those are probably gonna be two different… Those require two different skill sets, so you’re gonna talk about the different skills that you have, that make you qualified for that. So I’ll say that about multiple versions. The other reason to have multiple versions would be if you’re also maintaining a traditional CV. Remember, we talked about that in the last lecture. That’s the multiple-page document that really goes into all of your work experience, as well as academic experience, research, publications, that type of thing. So that’s definitely a different document for the most part, to maintain. In terms of the applicant tracking system or ATS is essentially a computerized program that a lot of large organizations use. It’s artificial intelligence, essentially, that scans your resume for certain keywords and certain things that they’re looking for, according to the job that’s been posted, and it can rank or score your resume against what they’re looking for. So if they receive lots of applications, which they do, that’s the whole reason why these programs exist, is because so many people apply online and not through other methods. It’s a way that they don’t have to expend human power, reviewing all the resumes.
0:32:19.2 Amanda: So they have a computer do it. And the important things here, there are a few things. You want to make sure that you’re uploading your document as a PDF, because if you use a word document, and if you have any alignment or text boxes or columns, it’s gonna throw the whole thing off. So a PDF is the way around that. Also, you wanna make sure that any acronyms are spelled out. So if you… On your resume, you wouldn’t put RN, you’d type out, registered nurse, because you don’t know what keywords they’re looking for. If the job description is that they’re looking for is the phrase, registered nurse, if you type RN, it might not show up. This is kind of like, you wanna rank on the first page of Google because you’ve typed in the correct search term, you want the search term to match what appears in your resume. And then the other thing is, making sure that the key words and the phrases that you’re including in your resume are actually what they want in their qualified candidates. So that means looking at the job description, potentially even printing it out and highlighting what they have in their requirements, and what they have in their qualifications or their preferred qualifications, and those things that you have.
0:33:38.6 Amanda: So if they want you to be a nurse practitioner, they want you to have X years of med-surg experience or whatever it is, you wanna make sure that if you have that, you’ve included a phrase that pretty much matches what they’re looking for, somewhere in your resume, so that they can match and give you that point. I know that’s a really quick quick overview of a complicated system. Those are kind of my top… Yeah.
0:34:05.7 S1: Yeah, I think we hear about these AI systems and we’re not really sure, and I know for a fact, we use them. I know, we used them in my previous administrative position, a lot, and I would get a lot of matches for people I did not… Weren’t necessarily looking for, because the system matched them. So for you, what does that mean? If you are transitioning to another job or you are looking for that first job, and you look at that job description and they say, advance practice registered nurse, all throughout that job description, what wording do you think you need to use in your resume? I would not put nurse practitioner. I would go back and I would make sure that I wrote advanced practice registered nurse throughout the resume, when I’m addressing what I’ve done, or my position or what have you. If they use the phrasing, nurse practitioner or NP, you’ve got to match the phrasing that is being used. You’re not copying the job description, we wanna be very clear about that, because that is very obvious and that’s not what we do. But if they have specific words that they’re using, especially or skills that you have experience with, what you wanna do is you wanna take that specific phrasing and be like, “Hey, I did that too.” And you wanna put that in your resume, on one of those bullet points, so that you match what the job description is saying, so the likelihood that you’ll fly through this AI system is higher than usual.
0:35:43.3 Amanda: Definitely, definitely.
0:35:47.7 S1: Alright. Do we have maybe one more question?
0:35:50.2 Amanda: There is actually one more question. The last question is, “I would like to know about a functional resume. I feel like I have frequent RN job changes due to spouse being in the military, and I’m not sure how to present that.” This is a really a great question, and I’m 99% sure, we briefly touched upon the functional resume layout in the initial lecture. I’m pretty sure I had a screen shot of it. But I’ll go over what that means. A functional resume is… A traditional resume is when you list your work experience in reverse chronological order. So under work experience, you’re listing your current or most recent job and you’re going back in time from there. What a functional resume does is, it extrapolates skills, rather than going on time.
0:36:41.9 Amanda: So a few things that you could do would be, to pull out some particular skills or core values or… Whether they’re soft skills or hard skills, and you can kind of feature those and then write paragraphs or blurbs about your experiences in those particular skill areas, or you could talk more specifically, about the specialties of practice that you worked in. So you might put critical care as a heading, and then you could list out the different roles that you had in critical care or the different skills that you had, without necessarily listing all the different jobs that you held. And then if you had another set of clinical experience, you could put that underneath. So it’s kind of a way of re-organizing your resume, so that you’re highlighting what you feel as well want to leverage as opposed to listing out things that may not be relevant.
0:37:45.5 Amanda: So in the example in the lecture, it was an attorney applying to midwifery school, and that attorney had experience as a birth doula as a volunteer. All of her work experience, her recent work experience was as an attorney, which while it had transferable skills, this individual really wanted to leverage their experience as a birth doula. So we did a functional resume, to really focus on her skills, as opposed to her chronological work experience. So hopefully, that’s helpful. And I think that if you’ve had frequent job changes, that may be a good way to present your work experience, by having a section on the top that really goes through those core sets of experiences that you want to highlight.
0:38:38.0 S1: So you would suggest having this as a break out area, and it’s kind of the best way to put it, instead of how we tend to go, summary and then experience or something like that, have it kind of as a breakout section in the beginning. What would that title look like? What would that…
0:39:01.3 Amanda: Yeah. I would probably put key skills or something like that, key highlights, maybe not necessarily skills. So you could do skills ’cause it… Soft skills and tactical skills. But yeah, I would do the summary and then this key skills or key qualifications, something like that, that section and then you could still put your work experience, but then I wouldn’t put bullets underneath them, I would just list 10 years of specific, two lines each, like registered nurse, critical care unit, X hospital, dates, and that’s just two lines and then you just do the next job on two lines and then the next.
0:39:50.3 S1: Gotcha. So I think everybody learned a little bit of something right there, ’cause that functional resume. So that is a… It’s a little bit different, it’s kind of the non-traditional approach to what we tend to see, for resumes. But for someone who is in the military or just in general, has a lot of experience, this might be a really good way to kind of consolidate all of that information. One, so that you also meet that one or two pages that we kind of talked about, and that your experience just kind of isn’t everywhere, and that you’ve consolidated for the person who is reading your resume, you’ve consolidated it into one area so that they can read it very clearly.
0:40:34.0 Amanda: Yeah.
0:40:36.0 S1: Awesome, awesome. Well, I think, by the wows and the ahs I’m seeing in the audience, I think that folks have learned a little bit and they’ve appreciated you answering. So again, I really do appreciate you coming back and kind of answering these questions.
0:40:54.9 Amanda: My pleasure.
0:40:57.5 S1: We may send you some more questions or ask you back at some point in time to come back.
0:41:01.4 Amanda: Of course, yeah, I’d love that.
0:41:04.6 S1: I think they really appreciated this and hopefully, you guys, go check out Amanda’s templates. And where can people find you, Amanda?
0:41:15.9 Amanda: Yep. My website is, theresumerx.com, and if you wanna go right to the templates, you can just do a /shop, S-H-O-P, or find me on Instagram, @theresumerx, that’s where I like to hang out.
0:41:28.3 S1: Fantastic. So again, I really appreciate you coming back. And as always, we’ll be in touch.
0:41:35.7 Amanda: Sounds good. Thank you for having me.
0:41:37.5 S1: Thank you. Alright guys, you’ve got lots of information and you know what that means. So you know that means that homework is coming your way. So that homework drop will be coming in about two days or so. We’ve got all the information that we need you guys to do. We absolutely want you to check out Amanda’s templates, if that’s where you are with your resume process. We want you to find her on Instagram, she gives out lots of good information as well, and she’s got a lot of things going on. So we want you to take a look and see if you are interested in any of that as well. But with always, if you have any questions, if you have even any further questions that you would like for us to give to Amanda for you, that we can kind of relay for you, or you can just contact her yourself, please reach out to either her or us, and we will get that for you. Remember, at the end of the day, our goal is that you find that next position. So we are looking for that for you. Alright, guys, as always, protective of your time, so it’s been great. We went a little bit over. And again, if you missed the beginning, there’s always the replay in your portal. So I’ll talk to you guys later. Alright, have a good one. Bye.