A UWaterloo actsci student asked me to post their resume for review. I figured you folks would have some useful advice. I’ll drop them a link to this thread with your comments.
I don’t consider myself qualified to review a resume, so I won’t comment much. Nothing seems glaringly wrong to me. Is it weird that the Bachelor of Actuarial Science is 2022-2027? I guess they do not anticipate finishing the degree until 2027 and are applying for an internship or something in the meantime?
Like Alexio, I’m hardly qualified to give advice and don’t see anything glaringly wrong.
The piece of advice that I’ll give is to have a story/explanation for everything you put on your resume.
As in, “tell me more about how you used excel to analyze and visualize student attendance…”
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on my phone, so a hard read, but i did notice
working experience not chronological
capitalization on middle job heading is not consistent
I would put only your expected graduation date next to the university name, not the date range. I don’t care how long you’ve been at school, just when you’re going to graduate.
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This.
Also, make the point in your résumé interesting enough to have an interviewer ask about it.
Skills area seems redundant to the projects.
You might care given my date range was 1984-2022 lol. In any event these are 5 year degrees because of co-op.
lol. Just giving my opinion based on my experience of reviewing resumes. I haven’t done it a ton though, and I think a lot of things are just personal preference.
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Not sure if there’s an expectation of Canadian employers to have work experience listed in order of “applicable experience” to the position applied for, but would suggest having them listed in chronological order (and by applicability if there’s a “tie”).
Drop the “SAS Base Programming” from the list since “Advance Programming” is going to assume this has been accomplished.
If you have experience (work related or extended project work*) that shows what tools/skills you’ve used, that is the preferred way to show that, IMO. As such, I’d drop the Skills section and trust that the interviewers are going to see this.
Note that an assignment for a class isn’t necessarily the thing to list here as most assignments are structured to focus on specific concepts or skills being taught. The key criterion I would use to determine whether a project would be good on a resume is whether the project is open ended–that is, are you free to choose the methods to address an open-ended problem.
Might put your sections in this order (if you’re applying for an actuarial position):
- Exams
- Education / Other certifications
- Work
- Projects / Everything Else
I agree with other’s advice about putting things on your resume in such a manner as to pique the reader’s curiosity and want to bring you in to ask more and that you should be able to talk at length about anything you put on your resume.
The thing I would add to this is to keep in mind that the purpose of a resume is to get you an interview; not the job. So you don’t need to be “comprehensive” (this isn’t a curriculum vitae) and many of the items you currently list on your resume can be brought up during an interview.
For example, if all you can say about knowing C# is that you had a general programming course and did some programming with it; I would suggest not listing that on the resume and save that for added information during an interview.
Not sure if the student uses a CV engine that allows you to modify/add templates and sections, but here is a very good site for CV design that may be of interest to them:
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Agree with the others about the design mattering a bit more here to get the reviewers interest.