Earlier this year, GovLoop and Young Government Leaders (YGL) launched the “Rock Your Resume” Project. It started out as a group on GovLoop in January, but has quickly grown to over 800 members. What began as peer reviews has evolved to leverage the experience of two top-notch expert reviewers – Camille Roberts & Paul Binkley – who are reviewing 10 resumes each month on a first come, first serve basis. To date, almost 100 people have received resume reviews. This is a free service we’re offering exclusively to GovLoop members…a service that would otherwise cost hundreds of dollars. If you’re not already a member of the “Rock Your Resume” Group on GovLoop, come check it out and submit your resume: bit.ly/glrockrezgroup
Normally, we only choose one resume for our “Government Resume Makeover” feature. The problem was that we had three people submit an updated resume in response to their reviews…and I like something about each of them. So guess what? You’re getting a “threebie” this time around (kinda like a freebie, but XXXL).
First, there’s Garry Christman, retired US Army, whose previous resume was a series of jobs and block-based job description. One of the main improvements that Garry made to his resume based on feedback from our reviewer Camille Roberts was to break out his activities and key accomplishments into bullet points:
The second submission was from Shawn Flynn, who is striving to get a job as an economist in the Federal government. Check out the the side by side comparison of his resume below. Noteworthy changes include:
- front-loaded it with all his keywords – one of the most important elements for getting through the gate for a Federal job.
- brought his top accomplishments, well, to the top
- broke out the blocks of text to make them bullets
- made his titles more prominent
What else do you notice?
Finally, I wanted to highlight Justin Kugler’s resume since he’s been in the space industry, which has become a pretty uncertain sector these days. Also, his changes are my favorite of the three (but don’t tell the others). I really like how he has organized his resume such that the keywords of the job announcement are the headings of his experience – IN ALL CAPS. There’s no way a reviewer is going to miss the connection between past experience and present opportunity!
So this…
So there you you have it! Three concrete ideas for your resume. If you’d like to land a new government job or just spruce up your resume, submit yours in our Rock Your Resume group.
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Previous Government Resume Makeovers:
– Government Resume Makeover: Bradley Olin Edition
– Government Resume Makeover: Jacob Hoots Edition
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