THIS is a time to celebrate the past and make plans to prepare for a fresh beginning. If you have spend the last year thinking about a career change or searching for a new job, this is the best time of year to fully engage in your adventure and prepare yourself for the networking and professional opportunities that arise.

Use a bulleted style to make your resume more reader-friendly. Given that employers screen resumes for between 2.5 and 20 seconds, they will find your resume a lot more readable if you use bullet points instead of paragraph style. It's just easier to read.

Decide if a chronological or functional format works best to package and market your experiences and background.

Eliminate "responsibilities" words from your resume vocabulary. Never use expressions like "Duties included," "Responsibilities included," or "Responsible for" on your resume. Why? Because your resume should be accomplishments-driven, not responsibilities-driven. Anyone (well, maybe not anyone...) can perform the duties listed in a job description. Job-description language is not what sells in a resume. Accomplishments-oriented language tells employers how you've gone above and beyond in your jobs, what makes you special, how you've taken initiative and made your jobs your own.

Eliminate clutter from your resume. Several elements can clutter up your resume and impede readability:
• Unnecessary dates. Don't list dates that don't add anything to your resume; for example, dates you spent involved in college extracurricular activities. If you were involved in these activities during college, the reader can pretty much guess your dates of involvement, and listing the dates will just clutter up your document. Same with dates of involvement in professional or civic organizations; ask yourself if those dates will be meaningful to the employer reading your resume.

• Parentheses. Jobseekers have a particular tendency to set off dates of employment with parentheses. It's easier on the reader if you just use commas.

• The line "References: Available upon request." This statement is highly optional because it is a given that you will provide references upon request. If you couldn't, you would have no business looking for a job. The line can serve the purpose of signaling: "This is the end of my resume," but if you are trying to conserve space, leave it off.

• Articles. Those little words "a," "an," and "the." Generally speaking, resumes aren't written in sentence form, but in concise phrases that have become an accepted shorthand that employers understand. Articles tend to clutter up that shorthand; your resume will read in a more streamlined manner without them.

Use strong, concrete verbs to describe your jobs, and don't mix noun and verb phrases. Let's look at this example:
• Managed and controlled all aspects of company's West Coast presence. [verb]
• Complete ownership of inventory and financial standards. [noun]
• Full P&L responsibilities. [noun]
• Analyzed market and forecast sales, prepared corporate budgets and monitored results to achieve ROI objectives. [verb]

Instead, be consistent with verbs:
• Supervised inventory and financial standards.
• Completely oversaw profit and loss aspects of operation.

Also avoid the weak verbs, "to be," "to do," and "to work." Everyone works. Be more specific. "Collaborate (d)" is often a good substitute. Instead of: "Worked with Marketing Department to launch promotional campaign," say "Collaborated with Marketing Department to launch promotional campaign."

Focus on describing past job activities that highlight the skills you most like to use and want to use in your next job. Don't spend a lot of time, for example, describing all that clerical stuff you did in a past job if you have no intention of doing clerical work again. Even if you've mastered skills that are in great demand, don't emphasize them if they're not the skills you want to use in the future.

Don't fret about the one-page resume rule. Sure, it's nice to keep your resume to one page if you can, but don't go to extraordinary lengths, such as by using tiny type. If you have significant experience, you'll probably need more than one page. What you should avoid is having one full page with just a little bit of text on your second page. If you fill a third or less of the second page, consider condensing to one page. Ways to condense:

o Narrow your margins. The margins in Microsoft Word are set very wide by default. You can have margins as narrow as.75" all around and still have a nice-looking document.

o Use a smaller point size, but not too small. A font size of 11-point is good; don't go too much smaller than 10.5-point.

o Many jobseekers use a two-column format with headings in the left-hand column. To conserve space, narrow or even eliminate the left-hand column and simply stack your headings on top of each section.

Make sure your resume has a sharp focus. Again, given the microscopic amount of time that employers spend screening resumes, you need a way to show the employer at a glance what you want to do and what you're good at. One way to sharpen your focus is through an objective statement. Another way is to add a section called something like "Summary of Qualifications," or "Profile."

Don't list too much experience on your resume. The rule of thumb for someone at the senior level is to list about 15 years worth of jobs. Age discrimination, unfortunately, is a reality, and even more likely, employers may think you're too expensive if you list too much experience on your resume. Similarly, don't give the date of your college graduation if it was more than about 10 years ago.

Be sure the reader will understand all the acronyms and jargon you use in your resume. Resumes in the high-tech field are notorious for these mysterious terms While most of you're the potential employers will understand these acronyms, just be sure that's the case. Spell out any acronyms you think could be questionable, and explain any terms you think some readers of your resume might not understand.

Bonus tip: Be sure to list locations (city and state) for all your past employers. It's resume protocol to do so, and employers expect to see that information. I'm constantly amazed at all the resumes I see that list names of past employers, but don't tell where those employers are located.