When you’re sitting down to write a resume, it’s hard enough to remember every job you’ve ever worked and everything you did in each one, the better to pick out the relevant information for whatever you’re applying for. But the hardest part – and the most important – is turning those responsibilities into accomplishments.
Responsibilities are not enough
It’s important to start with what you were responsible for. Those job duties are going to give a reader a sense of the scope of your position, and if you’re applying to a company big enough to run resumes through a key word search, those job duties will, properly described, light up with keywords.
But responsibilities alone aren’t going to convince someone to take you to the next stage of the application process, because nothing in a list of responsibilities will tell the reviewer if 1) you actually did what you were supposed to do, and 2) were any good at doing those things.
This is where accomplishments come in
Given all of your responsibilities, what did you get done? Did you streamline the technical process so website downtime dropped 10%? Did you win a $2m grant to research personality type at work? Did you grow the program from 5 minors to 100?
These are the kinds of things that tell a reviewer all about your strengths and skills – both your skills in the hard and your skills in the soft. If you successfully came up with, proposed, funded, and put on a brand new conference that has since become annual, then the reviewer knows you’re a visionary and you can make things happen. They know you can fundraise and make good arguments and coordinate lots of logistics.
And while you can tell them these things outright, it’s always helpful when a reviewer can see how all of your tasks added up to something important. That helps them envision what you might be able to do in this workplace. And that’s the kind of response that gets you an interview.
Working on applying to non-academic jobs? I have resume-writing superpowers that I’d love to use on your behalf.
Great idea about writing down a list of responsibilities and accomplishments. It could help one see what one has achieved rather than one feels one hasn’t achieved.