Resume and Cover Letter

Resume and Cover Letter
07/12/2006

Other Useful Links:

Prewriting for the Resume and Cover Letter.

Reminder!

Don't forget! You must include a brief memo which includes a description of specific position you're applying for, the url of the relevant spot from the Occupational Outlook Handbook, and the source code for the relevant job in Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Failure to include any one of these things with the final draft of your resume and cover letter will cost you a letter grade for each missing item!

Your final assignment prepares you for your future career. You are to write a resume and cover letter in which you apply for a job that you actually qualify for at this time given your education and experience. If you are a graduating senior, then you may apply for full-time positions that require a bachelor's degree. If you are a full-time student who is not a graduating senior, you can only apply for part-time work, or an internship, or a job that does not require you to have a bachelor's degree. If you are a part-time student, you may apply for a full-time position. Any job you apply for need not be related to your major. It must only be a position for which you currently qualify.

You should learn the following things from this assignment:

how to write a resume and cover letter
how to successfully market yourself
how to use career sources to better describe your experience.

To write an effective resume and cover letter, you must be able to demonstrate to a prospective employer that you are uniquely qualified for that position. To do this, you must know yourself well, but you must also know what the employer is looking for in an employee, and what exactly is the nature of the job for which you're applying. Consult the Occupational Outlook Handbook and the Dictionary of Occupational Titles found through the links listed above, so you can better anticipate the prospective employer's wants and better understand how you are qualified for the position you seek.

Look up your occupation in these two sources, and photocopy or download and print the relevant material. These two sources will not only give you a better understanding of what a person in that field does, but also give you the language to describe your qualifications. You may also want to use the following link to do an inventory of your skills and qualifications: Prewriting for the Resume and Cover Letter.

When you submit the final draft of your resume and cover letter assignment, you must also include the following items:

A brief memo written by you describing the specific position. I need this so I can better see how your resume and cover letter match the reader's needs

and at the end of this memo,

the url of the relevant spot from the Occupational Outlook Handbook
the source code for the relevant job in Dictionary of Occupational Titles

Failure to include any one of these items along with your resume and cover letter will lower your grade on this assignment by one letter grade per each item missing.

In addition, it's not a bad idea to find out as much information as possible about the company to which you're applying. The library has several books with information about major corporations, and many companies have home pages on the Internet. If you are applying to a smaller company, you may try getting information from the local chamber of commerce. And don't forget, you can always call the company itself in order to find out more information.

Your cover letter and resume should each be one full page in length. Some individuals may have enough information to fill a two page resume. However, if your resume must go to two pages, make sure that you have two full pages of information. There's no reason for your letter of application to be more than a page in length. Of course, your resume and cover letter must be typed. Your font must be 10 or 12 point. Finally, padding your resume with references doesn't count. References don't belong on the resume, but on a separate reference sheet (We won't be making reference sheets for the purposes of this assignment, so don't worry about coming up with references.)

I will use the following criteria to grade your assignment: Evaluation Criteria for Resumes and Cover Letters.

Finally, you only get one chance to make a first impression, so proofread carefully! Remember, some employers are just looking for an excuse to stop reading your resume and cover letter (too many qualified candidates to sort through), and a misspelled or misused word or serious grammatical error will give them that excuse. Any document containing a misspelled or misused word or serious grammatical error will receive an automatic "F."