Resume Sections: Education, Experience, and Skills

1. Education
Useful section for recent graduates and those with up to 15 years of experience. Less important for those over 40. In general, the more professional experience, the less emphasis on education.

2. Degrees
Think cumulative! If you have a Master's degree, you don't need to specify your Bachelor's or undergraduate degrees.
If your intermediate degrees are different from your final degree, then detail them.
If you have a Bachelor's degree (BAC+3), you don't need to mention your high school diploma (BAC).
If the name of your degree is an abbreviation, write it out in full as the recruiter may not know it.

Also, mention if you have completed a VAE (validation of acquired experience), used your DIF (individual training rights), or taken a CIF (individual training leave), related to the position you are applying for! This shows your dynamism and your ability to invest in your future!

3. Internships
Should only be included on a resume at the beginning of a career and in this case, are integrated into the professional experience section, without the word "internship" appearing: just because you weren't paid like a 'standard' employee doesn't mean your internship wasn't a full professional experience!
Professional Experiences

For up to fifteen years of professional experience, create an experience-based resume, detailing your experiences position by position, in reverse chronological order, as follows:

Start and end dates
Year/year or month year / month year (the day is superfluous)
If current position: "since..." or "from... to present"

Company name
Specify its activity - its turnover - the number of employees.

Job title
Your title - the department - the department's size
Example: Marketing Manager (4 people)

Job description
Responsibilities, role, tasks

Results achieved
Only quantified results are generally convincing

If you have more than fifteen years of professional experience, create a skills-based resume, first explaining the main skills that characterize you and that you have demonstrated throughout your career, before detailing your professional experiences position by position over the last 10/15 years. For older experiences, the dates, employer's name and job title are sufficient and do not need to be detailed, unless they correspond to the professional field in which you are looking for work.

4. Computer skills
Are you an IT professional? Show that you know the subject, without writing a long list. List your skills and only indicate those relevant to the job you are applying for. Long lists of skills are not always pleasant to read, and even less so when the skills listed are not useful for the position to be filled...

Are you not an IT professional? Specify if you can work on a PC and/or Mac, as well as the software you know how to use (spreadsheet, word processing, accounting software...). For well-known software, only mention their name. For others, very specialized, such as accounting, sales administration or HR management software, specify their purpose. For communication/marketing positions, indicate if you have graphic design skills, if you know how to use content publishing tools for the most well-known blog platforms, or if you are a Twitter or other corporate Facebook expert. This can be a plus for a company that wants to communicate effectively using Web 2.0 tools...

5. Language skills
More important for some positions than others, they should always be indicated!
Because it is still difficult to evaluate your own level of language proficiency, Monster now offers all candidates the possibility of knowing their English level free of charge and precisely thanks to a partnership with YES - Your English Solution.
In the meantime, don't promise recruiters a "bilingual English" level if you only understand every other sentence... To separate the wheat from the chaff, some recruiters don't hesitate to remind the candidate they want to interview that the interview will be conducted in the language of Shakespeare. You'd be in a tight spot if you had promised the moon...

To summarize, there are 4 language levels:

Bilingual: Because you have lived long enough in a country (English-speaking for example), or because your mother or father only spoke to you in English, you never ask your interlocutor to repeat their sentence, whether they have a Scottish accent or not! You are able to understand the technical explanations of a Manchester construction worker as well as a City executive.

Fluent: You don't need sentences to be repeated to understand them, but you do ask what certain terms mean that don't belong to everyday language (formal language, slang...).

Reading, writing, speaking: You can understand and use familiar and everyday expressions as well as very simple statements to meet concrete and immediate needs. You can answer questions that are very familiar to you.

School level: You can construct a sentence to make yourself understood, but it is rarely grammatically correct. You lack vocabulary and ask your interlocutor to repeat their words almost systematically. Despite this, you only understand them about half the time...

Monster.fr

Posted on November 28, 2011.