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A résumé is a piece of paper that tells a prospective employer about a job-seeker — who they are, what experience they have, and why the employer should hire this person. If someone wants to get a job, they'll probably need a résumé.

What if          came to you and asked you to help write a résumé to get a job as a         (fill in new job title). The employer needs to know if          has the skills, knowledge, and personality traits needed for a particular job. Can you pick out which of          's many skills are most important for different positions? Can you present them in such a way that the prospective employer can quickly and easily evaluate          's qualifications?

Task
Write a résumé for         . Put everything you know about          into a few short paragraphs that would convince a prospective employer to hire          for a job as         (desired position).

Resources
Résumé Checklist and Resources

Steps

1. First, decide what kind of job          is seeking. (Unless the type of job has been pre-selected by your teacher.)

2. Write down everything you already know about this person.

3. Use all the resources provided by your teacher or other resources available to you to learn as much as you can about          — jobs, important achievements, skills, interests, etc. Depending on your assigned person and the information available, you may have to make up fictional job titles or use approximate dates and locations.

4. Research résumé writing. Use the materials provided in the classroom or from other sources to gather more details about the different types of résumés. Choose one or more formats that you feel will work for         .

5. Look at sample résumés you or your class have collected. Identify those that have a style or format you might like to imitate or borrow. See how much detail each type of résumé includes.

6. Using the Résumé Checklist, list the major components of the résumé. Mark out any components you wish to omit from your résumé. Arrange your personal information in chronological, functional, or other appropriate form.

7. Write an objective for the résumé (based on #1 above). Even if you do not plan to use a Job Objective in the résumé it will help you decide what information is needed and what can be safely omitted based on what you hope to achieve.

8. Sketch out some rough ideas of how you want the résumé to look. Try out different formats to fit your text. Edit your text to fit your layout. Experiment.

9. Using the page layout software available to you, transfer your rough sketches to the computer. Your software may have templates or wizards that will provide you with even more ideas.

10. Print your final design.

Evaluation
Your teacher will use the criteria listed in the Résumé Checklist to see how well you have presented          's experience. Be prepared to explain why you made certain choices concerning the job objective, how you chose your format, and why you used certain words and phrases to describe          's experience. Your teacher may enlist the assistance of a professional résumé consultant or personnel director to evaluate your résumé. You may be asked to exchange résumés with classmates — but with the name omitted to see if others can identify your character based entirely on the contents of the résumé.

Conclusion
Writing a résumé helps you to see a person — historical, fictional, or even yourself — in new ways. Certain parts of someone's education or skills take on a different level of importance when you attempt to use that education or skills to support particular job objectives. A properly researched and written résumé can highlight someone's strengths and can show that people are potentially capable of much more than we might have expected.

Note to the Teacher: This project could be assigned to individual students or to teams of 2 or more students. You may want to assign a specific person or provide the class with a list of approved or suggested names. It would also be desirable (or interesting) to tell the student what job or type of job their person is seeking. You might make that position something related to the individual's "real" job or something entirely different — giving the student an opportunity to write a change of career résumé.

In evaluating the résumés, you may want to enlist the aid of a professional résumé consultant or the personnel director of your school district or of a local business. For younger students you may want to prepare a "fill-in-the-blank" form for the required information or for the résumé itself.

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