Engaging Résumés – and Making the Workshop More Engaging

Last night, I had the opportunity to present three sessions of the Engaging Résumés with QR Codes workshop that I’ve been refining over the last few months.

I offered the training as a co-presentation with Career Services director, Rebecca Maguda who had been asked to teach first year English students about résumé writing and building.  By packaging our two training sessions together – hers a hands-on session where an actual document was taken home, mine an exploration of ways to add a living layer of information to the flat document – we seemed to really get the participants thinking about ways in which they might be able to present themselves as a cohesive “product.”

An interesting note about the construction of the actual session:  during the first class slot, we went with me first and Rebecca second, as we thought showing them something flashy first might grab their attention.  Now, this was at 4:00 pm, so it’s possible that all they were hearing were dinner bells, but the students were far less engaged than when we found them to be in the 7:00 pm and 8:30 pm iterations when we flipped it around.  If not a hunger-haze, perhaps the act of building a résumé helped to put them in the correct mindspace and allowed them to see just what fits well in that format – and what could be expanded upon to help set them apart from the crowd?