Intro to Resumes
Being a professional is tricky. We learn all of these skills through on-the-job experience. We know what we know, but we often don’t directly learn how to share who we are with others in a professional setting. Knowledge is at our fingertips and we need a way to explain what we know with other professionals.
Q: How can we best present ourselves succinctly and professionally to others in order to get to the next round of interviews, speaking engagements, and other opportunities?
Whether you’re an Architecture Student getting ready to look for your first job or a seasoned Architect searching for your next one, everyone needs a way to convey their experience succinctly to a prospective employer.
If only there were a document out there that could describe the story of you.
You’re in luck!
Enter the Resume.
The Purpose of a Resume
A resume is, in its simplest sense, a summary of you.
A resume presents your background, skills, and accomplishments in a clear and concise format.
When you think about it, the format and inherent brevity of a resume is extremely useful.
Consider the alternative.
Hiring managers don’t have the time or resources to meet every person (as great as that person may be) who applies for a job. The resume is therefore an effective document for the hiring manager to sift through the mountain of applications they may receive.
The Test of a Resume
But the resume is far more than just a document. It’s also a test.
A resume can clue in a hiring manager as to whether or not you have the ability to assemble a relevant, single-page (yes, only one page!) summary of yourself without making any errors in spelling or grammar.
It also serves as a gauge of whether or not you can accurately ‘sell’ your personal brand to others. You may not be looking for a job directly in sales, but a hiring manager will want to confirm you have the necessary communication skills for the job they’re hiring for. The resume is the test of your ability in writing. The interview is the test of your ability in person. You don’t get to the second test without passing the first.
It’s also a test in graphic creativity and restraint. As architects, we work within an inherently creative field. Not only that—we work on projects that require us to edit our work and establish internal guidelines for our designs. Metrics such as scope, schedule, budget, and codes force us to make choices.
For better or worse, this means that our resumes, our cover letters, and our portfolios need to be treated with an equal sense of design rigor to get past the initial viewing. Hiring managers in design fields often are designers themselves (or have enough familiarity with the profession to filter good from poor design).
They are keen to the resumes that have been thoughtfully constructed. Regardless of what school you went to or how much experience you have, if your resume doesn’t pass the initial “judge a book by its cover” sniff test, your adventure ends here.
The Big Picture Format of a Resume
Some may say that your resume is just a silly list of accomplishments, stitched together through proper phrasing, sentences, and grammar.
Instead, I want you to think of your resume as something that requires just as much control of the content as the graphic representation of that content.
The easiest way to start your resume is to develop the overall graphic framework. This might seem daunting at first. I mean, there are literally thousands and thousands of graphic variants you could use for your own resume. Sorry, did I just scare you a little?
Sorry. :(
Did you know that there only a handful of narrative structures in storytelling? Every book you’ve ever read and every movie you’ve ever watched can be boiled down to one of a few story frameworks.
Just as in narrative storytelling, there a few key structures that can provide us with a place to begin telling your story. For our purposes, let’s take these three.
Straight
This format is the most conservative. It’s a classic, but can immediately feel dated if you’re not careful. It’s also the easiest to work with because it’s what most word processors (i.e. Microsoft Word) will default to.
Imagine a series of what are effectively paragraphs next to ranges of dates. It looks like a paper you might write in grade school, but it’s also the most widely used of the three formats.
Columns
This format establishes each category as a block within two separate columns. Think of each block as a piece that holds up the structure of the next. Sometimes this can effectively hide a lack of experience by focusing on the unique composition.
Spine
This format takes the Straight format and offsets the margin to create a hard, graphical edge somewhere in the middle of the page. This is my personal favorite as it keeps the composition minimalistic without seeming dated.
Don’t think too deeply on the overall format. If you want to, you can change it later. The best thing to do is to pick one and move on. Graphics matter, but the content of the resume matters far more.
The Details of a Resume
Now that you have a big picture format, consider more nuanced items in your design such as font type, colors, and white space.
Fonts
Think of how different fonts work across the page. Try minimizing how many fonts you use at all costs (and yes, different fonts include size changes, italics, bold, and every other variation you can think of).
Serif fonts tend to be easier to read (the ones with the wavy little articulations - Think ‘Times New Roman’), but they can feel a bit more conservative than their Sans-Serif siblings (Think ‘Arial’ or ‘Century Gothic’)
Color
I typically recommend that you do NOT use color unless absolutely necessary. It goes back to who could be reviewing your resume. If a manager prints out a copy of your resume, and then someone else makes a copy, and then someone else makes yet another copy, you have no control on whether or not that color will even make it through.
Be sure to test print your resume as both black & white and as color if you choose to use a color accent at all. If you do use color, use only ONE accent color with the majority of the resume in black and white.
White Space
As creatives, we may overlook white space as a design element. I mean, it’s just space. Right? Let me assure you—white space has the power to make or break a resume.
To avoid overdoing it in your composition, leave yourself ample margins on all sides of the page to avoid printer crop. This will give a hiring manager’s eyes enough open area to scan the page adequately.
You may want to cram every piece of information possible into your resume. Why not just include that time you went abroad or the job you had working in fast food? Ample white space can often show restraint and care. If you’re adding things in just for the sake of quantity, your resume will look bloated and will become difficult to read.
The aesthetic details are subjective and up to you. However, make sure that your resume is no longer than ONE page in length. It doesn’t need to be longer than that. If you can’t fit everything, start editing content out that doesn’t need to be there.
The Content of a Resume
After you’ve established a general format, let’s talk content.
Essentially, every resume is the same.
Two must-have components of your resume include sections on Education and Experience. After that, you can supplement with sections such as: Skills, Accomplishments, and Volunteering to expand upon the story of you.
Categories such as those can then be included on (or removed from) a resume submission based on either a specific position you’re applying for or a particular focus you want to highlight about yourself.
Content Block 1 — Education vs Experience
Whether you’re just starting your career or a seasoned veteran, you want to include the most relevant information on your resume in order from top to bottom.
For example, if you’re coming right out of college, you probably don’t have that much experience yet and should place your education at the very top of your resume.
The farther removed you become from school, the more likely you will have experience to match. In that case, list your experience at the top of the page.
If you can’t decide what’s more important, show a friend two versions of your resume and ask them what immediately seems more “impressive” to them.
After that, be sure to list your education and experience in reverse chronological order starting with the most recent job or degree. Write a brief sentence or phrase to establish your role and then create an itemized bullet list of the accomplishments you made while working there.
Content Block 2 — Skills
Everyone has skills. Even if you can’t recognize any immediate ones for yourself, there is something you’re better at than others.
There are hard skills and there are soft skills. Hard skills are based on measurable and easily-defined abilities. Soft skills are difficult to define and universal.
A common hard skill in a design position is often related to software. Maybe there’s a particular software program that you excel at (no pun intended).
List relevant computer software you know how to use and other abilities such as model-making to establish what you’re interested in. It’s not just about listing every program you’ve ever opened either. It’s about counting it towards your experience if it’s actually relevant to you.
Soft skills are more generalized and may include: creativity, collaboration, management, patience, organization, responsibility, etc.
A good measure of how relevant soft skills are to you is through story. Could you tell a prospective employer about a time when you implemented soft skill “x” in a practical way? If yes, it’s relevant and could be useful to that employer.
As a rule of thumb, list your skills in order of how well you know something, emphasizing skills relevant to the job you’re applying for.
Content Block 3 — Accomplishments
This is the ‘fun’ category because it tends to be among the most eclectic.
Accomplishments don’t have to be entirely professional. Did you win a chess tournament? Did you enter a design competition? Did you master a personal goal?
These kinds of items establish your interests and your skill without directly saying they are either. Try and think about what you do outside of studio or the office and bring those interests into the spotlight here.
Additional Tips and Tricks
Now that you’ve written out each of the primary categories and formatted them cleanly onto one page—Congratulations!
You should have the beginnings of your very own resume. Here are a few extra bits of advice to keep you moving and help you finalize your work and send your resume out into the world.
Always be thinking about what makes you stand out.
Consider that your resume is more than likely going to be lumped in with many others. If you wanted to stand out from the crowd, how would you do that it a tasteful and compelling way?Reverse engineer your resume.
Use the specific job description of the position you’re applying to and work backwards to include similar language and experience in your resume. Is the firm looking for a licensed Architect and you just got your license? Make sure to emphasize it. Is the firm looking for a BIM expert and you taught a class in Revit? You better list it well.NO SPELLING or GRAMMATICAL ERRORS!
Make sure that one or two people (other than yourself) review your submission before you hit send. Spell-check may catch most errors, but a real-life human is likely to catch even more. They are especially good at identifying language that may be technically correct, but look/sound weird in the context of a resume.Don’t exaggerate.
If you don’t have all the skills or experience someone listed in a hiring ad, don’t over exaggerate or lie to make someone think you have the proper credentials. It’s ok. Many employers can look past one or two deficiencies. Honesty though is always the best policy.Don’t include your references.
It’s common practice for a hiring manager to ask for your references if they are interested moving forward in the process. It’s unnecessary, however, to include them directly in your resume. Keep them ready in a separate file (on your letterhead) in case you need them. Also be sure to notify your references that they may be contacted if you’re applying for a specific position. Give them some background info and don’t let them be surprised when a prospective employer contacts them. It’s not a good look otherwise.Use grown up contact info.
If you’re applying for a job at an architecture office, leading with an email like videogamemaster@imthebest.com is probably not going to do you any favors. Use something simple that includes part of your name and a commonly used url (ie. yourname@gmail.com). Keep all of your contact info in an easy-to-find location at the top or left-hand side of your resume.Emphasize your most recent experience.
Your most recent position should identify more content and general accomplishments (if possible) than your previous jobs. This subconsciously shows both that you are actively growing in your career over time and that you are given more responsibility as you do.Keep it updated.
You may think you only need a resume when you’re looking for a new job. Instead, consider a practice of updating your resume at least once a year. This can make the process of cataloging updates far easier than if you wait several years at a time. You never know when you’ll need your resume for an unexpected opportunity or a job lost. You just never know.
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Final Thoughts
With a better understanding of what a resume can be, go forth and create one of your own. If you have a resume already, adapt it to better reflect the amazing person you are.
Consider the following:
Make everything extremely easy for a hiring manager to find and understand who you are, what you’re about, and why you’re a good fit for their team.
Keep your resume up to date.
Build a general resume and then curate its content to best fit the position you’re trying to get with it.
Choose a simple design layout.
Make sure your resume can be printed in B&W and still look good.
Keep the length to one page.
Spellcheck. Spellcheck. Spellcheck.
There will be many decisions to make about your resume.
Just make sure that you build the story of you with every choice.
Additional Resources
(Article) What Makes a Resume Great? 8 Resume Experts Spill the Secrets // Career Contessa
(Video) 8 Tips for Writing a Winning Resume // Thomas Frank
(Video) Resume Tips for Designers—How to Stand Out // The Futur
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