Yana Parker - The Damn Good Resume Guide: A Crash Course in Resume Writing

Copyright 2012 by The Estate of Yana Parker and Beth Brown
Copyright 2002 by The Estate of Yana Parker
Copyright 1983, 1989, 1996 by Yana Parker

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Previous editions of the work were published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, in 1983, 1989, 1996, and 2002.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parker, Yana.
The damn good resume guide : a crash course in resume writing / Yana Parker and Beth Brown. 5th ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Rsums (Employment) I. Brown, Beth, 1959 II. Title.
HF5383.P35 2012
650.142dc23
2012004816

eISBN: 978-1-60774-266-1

v3.1

The Publisher cannot guarantee that an e-reader device will correctly display these resumes formatting. Certain elementssuch as font type, font size, line breaks, type spacing, colum width, and justificationmay be compromised. If you have any questions about how a sample resume is supposed to appear, please refer to the print edition of this book.

The authors wish to acknowledge their colleagues, friends, and clients, for their assistance, advice, and contributions to this project. Thank you, people!

CONTENTS

HOW I CAME TO WRITE
THE DAMN GOOD RESUME GUIDE

For many years Ive had a great interest in peoples work lives and job satisfaction (including my own); this first showed up in a three-year volunteer job as director and coordinator of a community youth employment service. That led to a job with an upstate New York community college project to train unemployed high-school dropouts in job-related skills, and then on to a similar position as Community Worker with New York state employment offices in Albany, Troy, and Schenectadya job I really loved.

Later, living in California, I noticed that many of the people in my personal network were involved in career counseling and small business development, so I started organizing get-togethers to brainstorm and strategize about our own work, just for the fun of it. Then, in 1979, I decided to try self-employment, using my writing skills and my new red-hot IBM Selectric typewriter. I resigned from office work in the big city to use my talents in a more personally rewarding way. I began by offering an editing, typing, and business-writing service out of my home in Oakland, but soon specialized in resumes, because it turned out to be a natural for me, and because very few people seemed to know how to do it well.

I never really set out to write or publish this book. It started out, in 1980, as just a few loose pages of instructions and examples, handed to clients as homework before wed get together to work on their resume. (Id grown weary of giving the same instructions verbally over and over, so Id finally written them down.)

In our Briarpatch self-help group of small-business people, there was a financial consultant, Roger Pritchard, and one day I hired him to help me look critically at the fragile economics of my business. He noticed the packet of homework pages I gave to clients (by now it included sample resumes and a list of action verbs), and he asked, Why are you giving this away? Dont you see that its valuable, and that you could easily get a few dollars for it?

So I took his advice and at the same time expanded the packet and wrote up the instructions in greater detail. I designed a card-stock cover, stapled everything together, and priced it at $2. Over the following year I expanded it twice more, the cover price increased, and I began to suspect that it might be marketable as a how-to guide independent of my resume writing business. So I typed it up even more carefully, added some graphics, designed a more professional cover, and persuaded two Berkeley bookstores to carry a few copies on consignment.

It turned out that Phil Wood, owner of Ten Speed Press, almost immediately found a copy in Codys Bookstore, liked it, and proposed publishing it.

Now, many years and multiple revisions later, The Damn Good Resume Guide has clearly become respected and very popular in its field, with well over half a million copies in print. Professional job counselors call it the best available, and a fair number of job clubs and career development centers (and even college instructors in business writing, psychology, and womens studies!) use The Damn Good Resume Guide as required reading.

Yana Parker

IN YANAS FOOTSTEPSREVISING THE DAMN GOOD RESUME GUIDE

Since Yana first pioneered the idea of a resume as a marketing tool, times have changed. We are now moving rapidly through the twenty-first centuryand barely able to keep up with ourselves, in many ways. In the world of job hunting and resume writing, some things have changed, while others have remained the same. Its still important to create a document that is clear, accurate, articulate, and easy to read. Its still crucial that job seekers highlight their experience and accomplishments in a way that is relevant to the prospective employer, and its still crystal clear that many people need help with marketing themselves and their skills to get a job that meets their needs. Now, however, there are many more ways available to create, deliver, and distribute resumes to the outside world, due to the explosion of the World Wide Web and the ever-expanding assortment of online marketing tools.

Ive been walking in Yanas footsteps for more than fifteen years, writing resumes, cover letters, and other materials to help job seekers navigate the ever-changing job search landscape. As a bridge builder, I have worked with people from all over the worldcorporate, nonprofit, public sector, military to civilian, career changers, executives, college grads, fifty-plus, public figures, parents and others reentering the work force, white collar, blue collar, and green collar! As it was for Yana, resume writing was a natural for me, and Ive enjoyed finding ways to support, empower, and build the confidence of every job seeker, with the same sense of humor and the same straightforward, no-nonsense compassion that Yana was known for.

During my training to become a resume writer in 1995, I had lunch with Yana. We talked about many things, including but not limited to resume writing. I was glad to meet her and appreciated her warmth, humor, and clarity. For the next several years, I contributed to Yanas Damn Good newsletter.

Yana herself was always keeping up with trends and ideas; she would readily change her opinion and/or attitude about job-related subjects and publish her latest findings and thinking in her monthly newsletters. Although some things have remained the same in the job search world, there are now distinct differences, particularly related to the digital age. In the digital world what has changed is how resumes are being read. This revised and updated book provides readers with tools to help quell their fears of technology, while also providing access to up-to-date information about the latest in resumes, cover letters, and other job search tools via the companion website, www.damngood.com.