Most professionals working today grew up composing typewritten resumes. Even now, some younger people who are perfectly adept on the computer keyboard unconsciously make errors and use habits learned from a manual or electric typewriter use in the past. This leftover skill set can be harmful to your employment success.

When you compose a resume, usually you are making simple statements, maybe not even full sentences. Usually they are one line long, or part of a line in length. Almost everyone will hit the enter key at the end of these lines. Some people have their word processor set to space two or even three lines down after an enter command. This is left over from the typewriter era and is not necessary in the word processing era. Let the machine word wrap at the edge of the document so you dont have a page full of spaces.

Look at each line. Does it make sense? Is it in sentence form, with a subject, verb, etc.? Does it convey something important or is it repetitive? Is it based on feeling that you need to compose snippets of material to save time in typing and fixing errors? With the computer, you can compose all day long and not worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar, type face and spacing. The machine will point out all the errors and fix them instantly. Its not about white-out and correction tape anymore.

Its 2007. People are not printing out their resumes to read them. I think that is a mistake. When you read a resume online, in a message, or attachment, or in a file, its not the same as printing it in black and white and putting the entirety in your mind. Take your resume and pin it on the wall and step back 10 feet and look at it in the whole. What does it look like? Are there lots of white spaces? Do you find that half the resume text is on one side of the paper? Is there one last page with two lines on it? These are defects that are leftovers from the typewriter age when you had to retype the whole thing to fix the last line and had to set the tabs to get correct line width.

We have tabs in MSWord too. Learn how to use them. Learn about type faces. When you bought a new typewriter years ago it came with a little type wheel with Courier New on it because that was the standard type face. Dont pick some obscure type face on your computer. Use the standard from years ago because thats what people still expect. In the case of type faces, older is better because most of your high level readers will be older themselves and used to them.

If you learned to type a resume on a typewriter then you are used to putting in simple punctuation and maybe adding only one special character such as an asterisk. All of a sudden you can add bullets, arrows, squares, stars and so on easily. Dont do it. The reason why is because these special characters cause problems in resumes sent by email or as attachments. Special characters are not always going to show up on the screen as what you desired. Frequently they will show up as %20 or #,. I have seen resumes with long lists of accomplishments highlighted by bullets that were all turned into %20s. Not a pretty sight.

I often read resumes that seem to me to have been updated numerous times over the years and never started from scratch since the first year of employment of the candidate. These resumes have a sort of feel of scrolling through the history of different cultural eras in the employment arena. Some read like the 80s or 90s, other parts are more recent. We do use different words and phrases in 2007 than we used in 1987. This partial updating practice is left over from typewriting resumes on a manual typewriter. All of us just took the last resume, cut it apart, typed a few new lines and copied it and mailed it out. Where do you think cut and paste came from?

Your typewriter resumes need to be trashed and started over completely on the computer screen in MS Word using the guidelines in this article. Why use MS Word? Because it is the defacto standard word processing software in use in the business world. Its like the modern day version of Courier New and will still be readable many years from now.

I am certain your results in your job hunting efforts will improve when you polish your resume this way. I am interested in your results. Send me a note and tell me how these ideas work for you.

Dan Brockman
http://www.trainingjob.com