General aspects of Creating a Resume

Résumé, Curriculum Vitae (or CV) and Biodata are terms that are used interchangeably for a short document that summarizes your qualifications and work experience. There is a lot of material on résumés (REZ-u-may) on the web. Check out a simple google search on the term résumé. This blog is about the generic aspects of résumé. We will get to the specific aspects of how to translate military résumés into a civvy street résumé in a later blog. First the basics.

Definition
What is a résumé? Here is a description from Wikipedia:

A résumé (pronounced /ˈrɛzjʊmeɪ/ REZ-u-may or /rɛzjʊˈmeɪ/; French: [ʁezyme]; sometimes spelled resume) is a document used by individuals to present their background and skillsets. Résumés can be used for a variety of reasons but most often to secure new employment. A typical résumé contains a summary of relevant job experience and education. The résumé is usually one of the first items, along with a cover letter and sometimes job application packet, that a potential employer encounters regarding the job seeker and is typically used to screen applicants, often followed by an interview, when seeking employment. The résumé is comparable to a curriculum vitae (CV) in many countries, although in English Canada and the United States résumé is substantially shorter than CV.

Key Elements
If you break down a résumé, its key elements are:

• Title
• Contact Information
• Content
• Job Objectives
• Career Summary
• Competencies
• Significant Acheivements
• Work Experience
• Academia (including certifications)
• Template or Layout
• Formatting
• Keywords

The broad flow in 'contents' above is just a generic guideline and one does not have to follow it. It is always best to build a style that is uniquely YOU.

Keywords
Keywords have become important over the past decade or so, as increasingly, automated keyword scanning tools are being used to obtain a first pass shortlist. This is because the number of applicants are generally far more than can what be manually scanned. Remember, the first shortlists are generally done by professional headhunters who are required to do hundreds of scans a day and they don't want to waste their time going through the whole list of applicants.

Time over Target
If you make the shortlist, the recruiter scans your résumé to determine whether it is worth a second look. These preliminary scans take all of 6 seconds (yes, SIX seconds!!) on the average where your name, current title and company, current position start and end dates, previous title and company, previous position start and end dates, and education are casually perused (see article...).

The Network
It is little wonder then, if your résumés appear to be going down a blackhole. My own experience has been terrible (this inspite of spending a few thousand rupees to get it written by a "professional") and must set a record of sorts as I have not received a single response in over 10 years that I have had my résumé up on the net (on numerous job portals). The reason is simple. While senior management jobs are routinely posted on job portals, they are generally filled up through references. Period. So unless you have a strong network, the chance of getting a job through a portal is precisely NIL. Job portals are for those in their first few years of work. I would put 15 years as the outer limit beyond which, you will have to rely purely on your network.

Web Resources
Monster.com has an interesting section called "Resume Center" which gives good advice on numerous aspects. Here is a sampling on their current highlights:

• Is Loyalty a Hindrance?
• Handle your Work Haitus on your résumé
• Writing your First Professional CV
• Sample Job Objectives
• CV Do's and Dont's
• Complete guide on CV preparation
• The Art of Superior Communication
• 10 top reasons why you need a Cover Letter
• How to write an impressive résumé!

The complete guide on CV preparation for example, says that the most important attribute of a successful CV is that it clearly explains to the reader what it is that YOU can do for them, that your CV should be:

• A well-presented, selling document [not a biography of your past work experience]
• A source of interesting, relevant information
• A script for talking about yourself

The purpose of your CV is not to get you the job.

Its purpose is to get you an interview.

The CV has to be written for the reader, so, as you write your CV, put yourself in the shoes of the intended reader.

So, how many CV's should you ideally have?
Many people are surprised to learn that they should have as many CV's as job applications, each tailored for the specific opportunity and in line with the job description provided. Even job portals allow you to create at least five selectable profiles (though only one selected profile is made visible by default).

Write for the target level
Another key aspect is writing a résumé suitable to the level in management. Résumés for say "fresh graduates" would obviously be very different from that of a person say 5-10 years of experience. If you are targeting a position that requires over 20 years of experience, it is a very senior role and the content and style of the résumé should reflect that level of experience. Your language is a dead giveaway on your suitability for the job. At junior levels, the emphasis would be on your relevant technical skills. As you progress in your career, the emphasis has to change from technical to managerial and then to strategic skills where the focus would be quantifiable in terms of numbers indicating your impact on the firms performance.

Before Drafting
So before you sit down to draft your résumé, do some preliminary work understanding not only the company or position for which you are applying, but also in researching the huge amount of advise and feedback on résumés available on the net. And also advise for career changers. There is no substitute for online research and networking.

Career Changers
All of us who move from the military to civvy street are career changers! Yes, even the flyboys! The article at the link below will help you in determining the best form, content and highlights on your résumé.

Here is a synopsis of the article from the monster.com résumé centre titled "10 worst mistakes career changers make":

1. Don't look for a job in another field without some intense introspection.
2. Don't look for 'hot' fields unless they're a good fit for you.
3. Don't go into a field because your friend is doing well in it.
4. Don't stick to possibilities you already know about.
5. Don't let money be the deciding factor.
6. Don't keep your dissatisfaction to yourself or try to make the switch alone.
7. Don't go back to school to get retreaded unless you've done some test drives in the new field.
8. Be careful when using placement agencies or search firms.
9. Don't go to a career counsellor or a career transition agency expecting they can tell you which field to enter.
10. Don't expect to switch overnight.

Eight Worst Mistakes
Here is another interesting article on the "Eight Worst Resume Mistakes". To summarize:

1. Not determining a target or goal for the resume
2. Not understanding the needs or interests of the intended reader
3. Focusing just on the "duties and responsibilities" of previous positions
4. Leaving off quantitative information
5. Forgetting to tell the reader HOW
6. Using passive language, repetitive statements or the wrong technology
7. Using gimmicks
8. Thinking that inflating or exaggerating past experiences will make your resume more effective

Job Portals
For those who can use portals, here is a sample list of Indian job portals:

• Naukri.com
• TimesJobs.com
• Sampoorna.com
• MonsterIndia.com
• Shine.com
• JobStreet.com
• HeadHonchos.in

Portals like HeadHonchos provide facilitated search for a premium.

The point to note is that none of these cater for military officers retiring from service. However, some of the western economies like the US is very well organized and a number of services are available specifically for veterans. A simple google search will reveal a number of such service providers and portals. While they may not services for foreign army veterans, you can get a lot of pointers on the transition to civvy street.

For those of you with more than 15 years of work experience, LinkedIn.com is presently the best professional networking website available.

Other international portals

1. Global Executive Appointments: Exec-Appointments

Yakking to the media

This question has been bothering me for a while and especially over the past several weeks in the latest series of unseemingly tiffs between the Army HQ and the Ministry. Retired officers of all hues and shapes have been appearing regularly on national television and spouting their personal opinions as if it were representative of the majority in service, as well as those who have retired and moved on to other fields.

The moot question is:
Should retired Army officers be speaking with the media at all?

At first thought, the answer is a definitive NO! After all, you are retired and have, hopefully, moved on with life. The services command strong loyalties, due to its brand image, its elitist exclusivity and the many experiences it affords to officers. So letting go is difficult. But that should be viewed as the challenge, not the excuse for clinging on as a devoted evangelist.

Besides, the Army too would have moved on from the time you left it. Those of us who have been out of service for a while, we may not be able to even fathom the degree of change that has occurred even in such fundamentals as priorities, values and culture of the services. It only smacks you in the face when you are confronted with the frivolous level of conversations at annual regimental get-togethers and station social events to which you are invited, not necessarily because your association is cherished, but because it is the done thing.

However, getting back to the question of addressing the media, a roaring national debate may be the best outcome of the events of the recent past. At the present stage of human evolution, with the existance of nation states as our current reality, military security is an essential component of national security and a national debate on it can only be for greater good, especially in a democracy where elected representatives of the people constitute the state. If they are not educated, how will they acquire the knowledge and leadership abilities needed to understand the form and function and to be able to direct their armies within the context of a nation state? It is definitely not something that you can pick up overnight or even in the short five-year cycle of elected government. Of course, there are specialists who can advise, but in the Indian context, they have so far, been kept at arms length and outside of the government as attached offices, like in the colonial days. So who advises the government on matters of military security? The career bureaucrat, of course, and god bless India!

The fundamental challenge lies in educating, with all due respect, a miserably uninformed populace. People in general, have no interest beyond the perfunctory and no clue about what the military it is all about. For most, it is a subculture as alien as an extra-terrestrial. Many of the better informed consider it no greater than a glorified form of "chowkidari at the border". And I am perpetually amazed as to the large number of officers, who after spending many decades in service, have little concept of the role of the services other than "guarding the border". When questioned, it is the most common refrain. And these are the very people who appear as representatives and experts on defence matters. They have lost the plot even before they first open their mouth on television to confirm it in front of a national audience.

Not that the audience notice it, provided you look the part or "fit the mental image" of their conception of the archetypical "fauji". If he looks the part, he must be the real thing! And it doesn't matter what you say, because more than 90% of the time, you speak in a strange alien tongue, using a vocabulary which only some very hardened veterans can comprehend.

Consider this: How often, in all the courses you attended while in service, did you discuss national security and its implications, or for that matter, issues relating to higher defence organization or military security policy or civil-military relations? Or even, organization of the Defence HQ or the MoD and its charter? Or defence budgeting and capital acquisitions for that matter?

Speaking to the media is a highly specialised skill that the services are yet to develop - and it is called Perception Management. Most of the media briefings, say even at old public institutions such the US White House, is done by a qualified and nominated spokesperson. All formation headquarters have some semblance of this function, at least in form. Yet, they are rarely utilized, appearing more in the exception rather than the norm, that too when the army is pushed against a wall to explain some public incident. Even formation commanders can, while attempting to make a statement, inadvertantly put it across in a form which, while appropriate within the military context, is ambigious and open to interpretation by the media and results almost invariably in a raging controversy. We have seen enough instances of it in the recent past. Media is ubiqitous and managing it is a threshold competency in the 21st century.

The media tends to assumes that once you have accepted the invitation to appear on a scheduled program, you are knowledgeable about everything there is to know about the services, and many of us get drawn into a discussion on matters concerning, for example, say a sister service, and make statements without an ounce of knowledge about such matters. The escape option of apologizing and stating that the question was "outside your domain of expertise" is there for the taking, but rarely adopted! Attempting to answer it, no matter what, is a typical untrained and amateur response.

Media programs are also presented in different formats, with each having its own set of rules that have to be understood. There are "rules of engagement" that are different for each of these formats. A statement that appears reasonable in one format, may appear ludicrous in another. If you are not prepared, you can easily be provoked into saying something ill-conceived, without understanding all of its potentially controversial ramifications. But rest assured, it will come back to bite you when you least expect it, and usually at another time, and in another context.

That is part of their brief - to catch you off-guard and reveal something that can then be twisted into a sensation, that in turn will generate more sound bytes and yet more sensation and controversy! One of the first things you get to learn about the media is that it is a double-edged weapon and can cut both ways in the hands of an amateur spokesperson.

So given the complex nature of perception management and opinion making in the national context, how many of us have the necessary expertise to comment? Besides, vocabulary and parlance matter a great deal. Especially in a panel discussion where the audience can make a comparative assessment of the constituent members. Many a time, the service representative comes away appearing like a rare and antiquated fossil from a prehistoric era, much to the distress and detriment of the entire community of veterans and serving officers.

A typical panel discussion

Bottomline - if you have to yak, please do some general reading up on the relevant subjects. Find out the agenda, the bias of the anchor,  the background of fellow panelists and potential outcomes in terms of takeaways for the audience. Reflect on the subject matter, write about it, blog it and then, when the occasion arrives, speak in a parlance the general audience understands. There has to be a consistency, at least about the fundamentals. Samuel P Huntington's treatise "The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations" is a good starting point, especially in the context of recent events here in India.