A resume is a piece of paper that tells a prospective employer who you are, what you've done, and why they should hire you. If you want to get a job, you'll probably need a resume.

More of this Feature • Index of Lesson Plans

But an employer doesn't need to know absolutely all there is to know about you. They need to know that you have the skills, knowledge, and personality traits needed for a particular job. Can you pick out which of your many skills are most important for different positions? Can you present them in such a way that the prospective employer can quickly and easily evaluate your qualifications?

Task
Write your own resume. Put everything you have learned (in school, in extracurricular activities, in volunteer or paid jobs) into a few short paragraphs that would convince a prospective employer to hire you (or convince your teacher to promote you to the next higher grade).

Resources
Resume Checklist and Resources

Steps

1. First, decide what kind of job you seek. It could be a real job that interests you or simply the job of reaching the next grade level in school.

2. Write down everything you can think of about yourself. List every job you've ever done (real jobs, household chores, extra jobs at school such as hall monitor, line leader, or crossing guard). List your education — schools, grades, special classes (such as a basket weaving class or a karate class). List your extracurricular school activites (football, band, chess club, debate team). List your activities outside of school (camping, skateboarding, raising chickens). List any awards you've won, honors you have received, or special recognition.

3. Research resume writing. Use the materials provided in the classroom or from other sources to gather more details about the different types of resumes. Choose one or more formats that you feel will work for you.

4. Look at sample resumes you or your class have collected. Identify those that have a style or format you might like to imitate or borrow. See how much detail each type of resume includes.

5. Using the Resume Checklist, list the major components of your resume. Mark out any components you wish to omit from your resume. Arrange your personal information in chronological, functional, or other appropriate form.

6. Write an objective for your resume (based on #1 above). Even if you do not plan to use a Job Objective in your resume it will help you decide what information is needed and what can be safely omitted based on what you hope to achieve.

7. Sketch out some rough ideas of how you want your resume to look. Try out different formats to fit your text. Edit your text to fit your layout. Experiment.

8. Using the page layout software available to you, transfer your rough sketches to the computer. Your software may have templates or wizards that will provide you with even more ideas.

9. Print your final design.

Evaluation
Your teacher will use the criteria listed in the Resume Checklist to see how well you have presented yourself and your experience. Be prepared to explain why you made certain choices concerning your job objective, how you chose your format, and why you used certain words and phrases to describe your experience. Your teacher may enlist the assistance of a professional resume consultant or personnel director to evaluate your resume.

Conclusion
"A good resume predicts how you might perform in that desired future job."
— Yana Parker, author of Resume Pro: The Professional's Guide

Describing yourself is not as easy as you might think. Writing your resume helps you to see yourself and your personal experience in new ways. Certain parts of your education or skills take on a different level of importance when you attempt to use that education or skills to support your stated job objective. A properly researched and written resume not only helps to show prospective employers (or teachers) how you might perform at a new job but it also helps you see your own strengths more clearly.

Note to the Teacher: In evaluating the resumes, you may want to enlist the aid of a professional resume consultant or the personnel director of your school district or of a local business. In the case of Vocational Training/Studies, this lesson could be evaluated in connection with real or mock job interviews conducted in or out of the classroom. For younger students writing a "resume to get promoted to the next grade level" you might enlist the aid of students and teachers from the next higher grade to provide feedback to your students. For younger students you may want to prepare a "fill-in-the-blank" form for the required information or for the resume itself.

Download lesson plans in *.doc format