A question I often get is “How do I create a great university grad resume?”

Now the first thing I’m going to say is that university grads will often have a mix or range of experience.

So, if you feel as if you don’t have much experience, this isn’t a time to freak out, instead it’s a time to assess what you already have. That might be in the sense of volunteering or specific key projects you’ve done as part of your university degree.

Start by having a look at what you’ve got, that you might not have recognised and once you’ve done that, there’s the opportunity and the space to figure out what you can do next.

“This is my resume now, how can I build this out, how do I grow this further and how do I chase down and create more opportunities?”

In terms of the experience that’s going to make a difference, you want to highlight the experiences that are aligned with what you want to go for.

So if you were going for an analyst role you want to highlight those types of roles that showcase the skills necessary for an analyst.

You want to be able to have the projects and the things that you work on, show up as present. If they are the only things you have, that’s okay. As you go through and you build up your experience, notice that the real life experience starts to take over which is perfectly fine.

My university resume had probably half a page of different club and society work that I did as that was something that I poured my heart and soul into and spent so much time working on.

At that time, in university, that was fantastic however those experiences don’t need to show up on my resume forever. Now I present that entire period of my involvement in clubs and societies, including my role as a vice-president, a president and a founding vice-president across 3 years as a single line on my resume. It’s still on my resume as it’s a key part of who I am.

In terms of a university grad resume, just recognise it’s the resume for where you are right now and where you are right now is perfectly fine.

You can do things to bring skills and experiences forward by focusing on the size, scale and complexity of each given experience, and thinking about how big the role is and how large the team is. Are you working with other organisations and how complex is the role?

Now if you think about all those different things that you are doing, you can start to put those on your resume and have those represented.

So when someone reads your resume they’re not just getting a list of what you’ve done but instead an outline of your achievements which will make a massive difference in your university grad resume.