resume tip

Highlighting Skills and Qualities from Non-Work Activities

You do have the leadership, teamwork, or organizational experience for that great job your friend told you about. But your resume doesn't show it, because you didn't acquire the experience from work. You acquired it from community service. Or participation with a theater ensemble. Or teaching Sunday school. Or political activism. Or coaching tennis.If you are changing careers or are short on work experience, you may want to draw on your non-professional experience to demonstrate the skills, talents, and qualities that a desired job requires. You can use your resume to do so, by providing details of the relevant activities.

First, identify the skills, talents, experience, and/or qualities you want to portray, and then the related activities. Add a section called "Other Relevant Experience" after the "Professional Experience" section of your resume and use bullet points just as you do for the work section. The basic approach is the same: present specific accomplishments to illustrate your skills/experience. Here is an example for a person who wants to highlight leadership, communication skills, and initiative:

• Teacher of ESL and American Life Skills classes, ABC Community Center, 9/04-present.
• Teach weekly class of 20 adult students who recently immigrated from Central America.
• Identified need for guidance in adapting to new culture; developed proposal, including curriculum, implementation plan, and suggestions for funding, for new American Life Skills Class.
• Presented proposal to program director and board; received approval in one week.
• Recruited and trained three other volunteers to team-teach the course.
• By obtaining regular feedback from students, continuously improve and refine course.
• Developing new proposal for weekend "crash course" on U.S. employment practices.

If this person is a junior-level accountant seeking a broader corporate finance role involving cross-functional processes and project leadership, or a computer engineer seeking an IT consulting position involving client interaction, teamwork, and initiative in problem-solving, this non-work experience is clearly valuable to her marketability.

Cindy Tokumitsu
Senior Editor, Accepted.com