The essential features of Optimal Resume — Jessica’s Career Tip of the Week
Optimal Resume is an amazing resource for any engineering student to obtain valuable feedback on their resume and to enhance their professional image. If you’ve never heard of it before, I highly recommend checking it out on Handshake > Career Center > Resources. At this time, I am going to provide a summary of the great feature that Optimal has to offer!
The question you may be asking is: How does Optimal help you? Let’s start from the beginning in which you will find yourself needing to create a resume from scratch.
The Document Center will be your hub for organizing your activities and formatting them in a professional manner.
The Assessments block is a great resource for identifying valuable skills in the workforce that you currently have.
To begin, the Skills Inventory lists a variety of desirable skills and abilities in an empty grid so you can fill out the spaces with instances where you display them. For example, you may have demonstrated time management in an internship by maintaining a calendar for meetings, planned breaks, and deadlines to keep yourself efficient. By filling out the grid, you can gain a better understanding of your own experiences and your developing skillset.
The Accomplishment Sheet is very similar to the Skills Inventory, but the skills that you select here are specific to the area of the workforce you want to enter; this worksheet can help to impress future employers by actively showing them that you have experience in exactly what they’re looking for.
The Proficiency List rounds off your marketable skills by offering a place to gauge your proficiency and describe why you feel that way. At the end of this series, you should have a strong idea of what you can offer to companies and the stories to back it up.
With your marketable skills in hand, it’s now time to construct your resume. Optimal offers a wide variety of templates that you can use to get a good start on your first resume. Upon selecting a template, an intuitive editor allows you to fill in information easily, reorder your document as desired, and even provides video tutorials to unlock the full potential of the editor.
On a related note, the Fulton Schools Career Center provides a sample resume on its website that incorporates many industry expectations that other templates might not have; you can edit the sample directly, but you won’t have the automatic formatting that Optimal offers. All these features apply to cover letters as well.
Now, let me tell you about the best resource that Optimal has. Once you finish your resume in Optimal or upload it, you can go to the Review Center tab and get personalized feedback from the Fulton Schools Career Center! We are more than happy to provide comments for improving your resume, so do not hesitate to have your document reviewed!
What’s next? Once your awesome resume results in an interview, Optimal can help you practice your interview. The Interview section in the Document Center provides an abundance of common questions and the ability to record your responses for later reference or sharing with colleagues for feedback. Each question contains a video of the interviewer asking the question and a coach breaking down the best way to respond.
Note, you will need to have Adobe Flash enabled to see these videos. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect! Use this resource to practice good interviewing habits (such as answering through the STAR method) and recognize what employers are looking for in their questions.
This is just a brief walk-through of Optimal Resume’s impressive suite of resources, but words alone can’t describe its benefits. Take a look and test out these features for yourself!
**This blog was written by Keene Patarakun, Peer Career Coach