Customize your resume
Customize your resume and your cover letter based on the job offer. Doing so will make you stand out from other generic resumes and cover letter and show your interest in the offer.
For this you need to learn as much as you can on the company and the job offer by doing some research.
Pay attention to your wording
- Use the word “training” to describe your education (instead of “studies”, “cursus”, “formation”, etc)
- When describing yourself, either say you’re a student or an intern, but not both
- When describing a title under your name don’t put determinants such as “A”, so say “Highly motivated graduate” rather than “A highgly motivated graduate”
- When describing something you’re passionate about, you can either say “I’m passionate about something.” or say “I have a passion for something.”
- Pay very close attention to spell-checking and proof-reading of your resume…
Structure of a resume
You can find a ton of different templates for resumes online, which you can use as a strong base for building your own.
Header and general information
The header of your resume should include general information to help the company contact you, you can therefore include:
- Your Linkedin
- Your phone number and/or your email address
- Eventual other accounts such as GitHub, etc
Don't forget your privacy
Unless specifically requested by the company, avoid including personal information such as your precise address, your legal/martial status, etc.
Personal summary (AKA “About Me”) section
Use positive language, what you’ve learned during your experience and training, some general skills and your goals.
In order to write this section, as well as the rest of your resume, you can try to figure out your strengths and weaknesses.
Skills
For each sets of skills, it’s a good idea to highlight which ones are your favorites to show which skills are your main expertise. You can for instance do this by highlighting them in bold or putting them first in the list.
And for each you don’t need to list them all, try to do some research about the job offer to find out which skills they are looking for.
Soft skills
It’s a good idea to describe your softskills, doing some introspection work about your strengths and weaknesses, can help you a lot for this part.
Hard skills
You can then describe your hardskills, such as the technologies you master, methodologies, tools, languages, frameworks, etc.
Linguistic skills
For linguistic skills it’s generally not a good idea to use wording such as “B2 level” as those kind of certifications are strictly european.
As for languages to describe your skill level for each language:
- Native, this language is the first language you’ve learned in your life
- Fluent, you are almost as confident in that language as you are in your native language
- Proficient, you are very good in this language and almost fluent
- Intermediate, you are good in this language but might be harder to hold conversations about specific topics
- Elementary, you can hold basic conversations but that’s it
- Beginner, you are currently learning this language
Work experience
In English, say "work experience" rather than "work experiences"
For each project (hobby or not) or job done, describe:
- The start date
- The end date (or “present” if it’s still ongoing)
- The employer (identifying information about the company/project)
- The job description/title/role in the company or project
- Examples of accomplishments/tasks
- Description of the skills involved with those tasks
Differences in ways of expressing accomplishments and tasks in French and English
- In English, it’s preffered to start with a verb of action such as “Developped a new API”
- In French, it’s preffered to start with a noun such as “Développement d’une API”
Using a noun instead of a verb might sound a bit too abstract compared to the general norm of English resumes.
Education
Put "education" first if you have little work experience
If you have little relevant experience to show in your resume, prefer to put your education before your work experience.
Likewise, if you have a lot more work experience than education, put the work experience first.
For each training you did, include:
- The title of the training
- For a bachelor’s degree : “Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science / Software Developpement”
- For the Belgian’s CESS : “Certificate of Upper Secondary Education”
- The place of the training, and try to precise the full name of the place as your employer might not necessarily know about it.
- The start date
- The end date (or “present” if it’s still ongoing)
Generally this is enough and you don’t really need to describe your training in details in this section.
Other potential things to include
In addition to your education, work experience, contact information, general information and skills you can include:
- Accomplishments such as competition and awards.
- Interests and hobbies