[MUSIC] Welcome to week five in the job interviewing and resume writing Capstone project. Your learning goals this week will be to write three resumes and cover letters to complement the pitches you created last week. The resumes and cover letters should be aligned to the positions you identified in week three. Included in the readings attached to this lesson are several resources describing workforce competencies. This quotation from the Canadian Resource Agency's Competency Catalog should serve to remind you of this key idea. Remember, competency-based thinking looks beyond skills and capabilities. It, of course, includes these abilities and behaviors as well as knowledge that's fundamental to the use of a skill, but it emphasizes what top performers do to achieve success. Competencies describe the key characteristics that help successful performers be successful. Most importantly, competencies describe those successful behaviors in terms that are observable, which means, for your purposes, in terms that can be demonstrated to a hiring organization. Core competencies are those needed in any position of an organization. Team work, initiative, reliability, integrity, high work standards, stress tolerance, these are examples of typical core competencies. Critical competencies identify what top performers do to achieve success in a specific position in an organization. These depend on the position that you're targeting. They can encompass anything from a banker's competency in economic research and report writing to an engineer's competency in quality control and troubleshooting, to a project manager's competency in managing contractors. What's important to keep in mind as you go through this week's milestone is that you want to demonstrate both core and critical competencies in any resume you write. Your cover letter will then highlight the three or four competencies that you judge to be most important for the position you're focused on. Now let's review the six-step approach to resume-writing that you learned about earlier in this specialization. Your first step is to identify core and critical competencies for the position. You should already have done that when you developed your pitch repertoire. Then you reflect on what you've done that demonstrates expertise or experience with each of the competencies. Again, you should already have made use of your accomplishments journal to develop strong statements for the critical competencies you've identified for each position. Then you write a keyword-rich summary section that emphasizes your experience and strengths related to the key competencies for the position. You personalize that section to show how your why aligns with the needs of the hiring organization. You should've already taken steps in that direction when you developed you JIST cards. Now, you'll consider which resume format best fits your objectives and write the first draft for your peers to review. You'll then add additional sections, for example, education or publications, as needed to flush out the resume. Finally, you'll polish the resume for power and impact. You'll prioritize competency-related phrases in your summary section and competency-based accomplishments within the resume. You'll deploy power packed action words to upsell your experience. I've reposted a number of the video lessons from the course on writing resumes and cover letters. Review these and then get to work targeting your resumes according to the positions you've selected. Broadly speaking, if you're targeting an entry-level position, you need to demonstrate evidence of your aptitude and coachability. You need to be able to take direction and learn fast. Your goal is to find aspects of almost any past experience that play into the core and critical competencies for that position. School experience, community experience, your own hobbies, any experience that has relevant aspects apply here. Again, speaking broadly, if you're after a mid-level position, you want to demonstrate competencies in taking senior management objectives and translating them into tasks and objectives for a team to accomplish. You want to show how you can inspire people to work as a team, to do their best, to take ownership of their tasks. You demonstrate how you can set up mechanisms to assign, train, monitor, and complete the work, how you can coach the people reporting to you. And, most importantly, you want to demonstrate your competency in holding people accountable for the work they perform. Finally, if you're seeking a senior management position, then you want to demonstrate forward thinking and your ability to think strategically. You'll show competency in aligning organizational objectives with the work your team needs to perform and in driving change. You demonstrate your competency, informing and nurturing relationships, both internal to the organization and external. You demonstrate your ability to recognize good and bad cultures and to influence and slowly change the culture of a large team. You demonstrate your ability to carry responsibility, learn from your own mistakes as well as those of your team. You want to demonstrate your leadership style and be able to explain the reasons for it. These are broad guidelines and should come as no surprise to any of you. I think the main challenge you may face in this milestone will be to get comfortable writing multiple resumes. The key learning goal here is to liberate your mind from the trap of one size fits all. You should think of resume and cover letter as plural concepts, multiple resumes, targeted cover letters. Focus on a specific position in a specific organization. Analyze the core and critical competencies needed, reflect on your fit and your accomplishments inventory, and write clear, compelling accomplishment statements. Include keywords for the human and robotic resume screeners. Think about a system to help you. A simple approach is to use index cards. Keep your accomplishment statements on one side. On the other side, list the competencies demonstrated by that accomplishment. For tiered accomplishments, you can key code the cards together. Then do your best to keep the system up to date. For the techies out there, this is a straightforward database. But for those who are not database developers, an index card system will work fine. Then when you have a position targeted, line up the core and critical competencies with your accomplishment cards and put together a resume in whatever format best suits your objective. [MUSIC]
