How to Create a Resume for Promotion
You want a promotion. You want to make more money and advance your professional life. Better professional opportunities begin with your resume. Creating a resume to get a job promotion is different from securing your first job or lightly considering part-time work. To get a promotion, your resume will need to be your marketing tool. It will focus on you, not the jobs you've held. It will paint a picture of your future, based on your accomplishments, not your activities. Follow these guidelines and you will create a resume for a promotion.
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Things You'll Need
- List of your skills, abilities, and knowledge
- List of recent work experience
- Knowledge of the requirements of the promotion you want
Instructions
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Creating a Resume for Promotion
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Define the exact job you want. This task will require some promotion-based resume research, including online searches and personal interviews about the industry, its future, and your potential job role in that future. Talk to people who already work in that field or for the specific company you want to join.
Find out what skills, knowledge, and experience appeal to the company. Use the language of that industry in your resume writing. You are more likely to get an interview if you already use words and terms that are familiar to the person who will receive your resume. "We look at the resume for the following things in this order: relevant experience and education, truth in advertising, and personal qualities (to the extent that we can judge from the resume), such as competence, maturity, enthusiasm, positive attitude, and likability," says Dr. Jerrold Shapiro, Ophthalmology Program Manager at Candella Laser Corporation.
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Create a list of 3--4 of your strongest skills, abilities, and knowledge that match the promotion you want. Demonstrate your desire and ability to learn through the classes, certifications, and experiences you may have added to your skill set in the recent past. Potential employers are looking for your accomplishments, not your activities.
Use active words in your resume such as "introduced, saved, increased, improved, developed, enhanced" and tie these words to company benefits. Saving money, improving efficiency, and developing new leads are desirable traits every employer would like to have. Powerful action statements show that you take initiative to add new skills sets and show a pattern of life-long learning.
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Write your promotion resume in either functional or chronological order. Chronological order works best if you are advancing in your current field of expertise, listing your jobs in sequential order beginning with the most recent. Functional resumes are more advantageous if you are changing careers or primary job roles, where you summarize your work experience to match the requirements of the job you are seeking.
When you are finished, don't keep your newly created promotion-based resume to yourself. Network with people who can offer you a job, tell you about a job opening, refer you to someone who can arrange an interview, or give you the name of someone who can do any of these. The more people who know you are looking to advance your career and want to become an asset to the company you work for, the better the odds that you'll receive a call from an employer that could change your life.
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Tips & Warnings
Ask a few people to read and critique your resume. They should be able to understand who you are and what you can do just from reading your resume.
Begin your sentences with action words. They will grab the reader's attention.
Be truthful in the descriptions of what you've done and can do. If hired, it will be readily apparent if you cannot perform the tasks you said you could in your resume. This fraud could lead to a quick dismissal.
Don't exaggerate or minimize your accomplishments. Both will dampen any enthusiasm your potential employer may have for you.
