Reading
It's easy to spot where the 1st "boring" resume goes wrong (it's just a list, with very little organization), but many of the resumes in the "inspirational" article are potentially flawed as well. These resumes are primarily aimed at jobs in the design industry, where unconventional choices might impress employers. However, look at how these resumes might make some of the most important information (contact info, education, work experience) hard to find.
The first resume in the article is a perfect example. The charts are very interesting, but do they make it too difficult to get a sense of what skills and experiences the author might have? If you are hiring this person to design interesting charts, then this might impress you. If you are hiring someone to engineer more efficient sprinkler heads, it may not.
Ideally, you'll be able to find the design and organization that fits your skills and experiences, that strikes a balance between an under-designed, boring resume, and an over-designed, distracting resume. This project is designed to help you figure out what will work for your resume.
This is not to say that the resumes in the "inspirational" article are bad. Some are fairly straightforward (scroll down to Tyler Spader's, for example) and make important information easy to find. There may be ideas and elements in them you think work well, and you may want to borrow those for your own resume (I don't recommend Tyler's super-long letter "T", though). The important thing is that you are making thoughtful decisions about how you want to present yourself and your professional experience.
Assignment
The Swipe File:
In order to enhance your sense of what a well-organized, attractive resume can look like, I want the whole class to contribute to what's called a "Swip File." This is a large collection of sample documents from which writers and designers borrow (or "swipe").
At the beginning of Week 2, I will create a blog post called "The Swipe File," to which each student will add a comment listing at least 3 sample resumes they have found online (just copy and paste the web addresses where the are located). These can be resumes that you feel are strong in many ways, or just have one or two good points. You may even pick an "ugly" resume as an example of what not to do, but mainly try to find "good" examples. For each example, offer a brief one or two sentence description about what you like or dislike about the resume. Read the previous comments to make sure you aren't re-posting a resume.
This Swipe File will be a resource for all student in the class to use to get ideas for their own resumes. Of course, you should not simply copy the entire design of one of the sample resumes, and you are free to ignore them entirely (but why would you want to?). If you are afraid that something you are borrowing might constitute plagiarism, just show me what you're doing and I'll let you know.
If you find more than three examples you think will be helpful to the class, you are welcome to upload as many as you like.
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