After a couple of discussions with professional resume writers, I've now completely overhauled my resume. A couple of the summary highlights of the discussions included the branding through a professional profile/summary of skills, experience, and strengths as well as revamping the experiences into quantifiable accomplishments. In the case of the latter portion, an example would be instead of saying that you have increased sales, provide a specific number ('improved sales through new low cost methods resulting in 25% increase in sales within 6 months' or such). It took some time to do this as I had to research documents and think in terms of how my accomplishments resulted in quantifiable improvements.
In some areas this was more difficult because it's hard to quantify how my efforts to improve relations between central university administration and the academics resulted in something other than good will and greater cooperation and alignment with administrative goals but I did it wherever I could.
In reviewing my old resume it was clearly written more so with an 'in the spirit of...' mentality than quantifiable accomplishments. I still believe there is quite a bit of value in many of those accomplishments, particularly when it comes to organizational change and strategic initiatives which may not often have specifics that can be tied back to numbers.
Either way, I left a few of the non-quantifiable items in there but I otherwise overhauled the format and content. It's not a small task and it probably took about 10 hours with the greatest amount of time spent on two short paragraphs providing an executive profile.
It will be interesting to see how that works out, I'll continue to update the blog with the results....
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