Update Your Resume in 30 Minutes – Here’s How

It’s time to update your resume document and make some edits. Let’s do it! Pull up the resume, create a copy and rename the file, and let’s get to the adjustments. Here is how to revitalize and update your resume in about 30 minutes.

1 – 10 Minutes: New Content

If you are seeking a new job, you will want to maintain the basic outline of your previous work experience, but now you will have more to add. Think about your current job, as well as any relevant side-gigs and extracurriculars that you may be engaged in.

Keep in mind that a potential future employer is not overly concerned with your current job’s day to day duties, so you do not need to write down every minor task you are responsible for. Instead, try looking at your daily duties from a different perspective. Do you have any responsibilities that a person simply looking at your job title would not know about? Are there things you specifically are interested in doing moving forward? Were you part of some important and impressive company-wide initiative? Try to quantify as many of these accomplishments as you can in a bulleted form.

Because the goal here is to do this in under 10 minutes, try not to over-focus on writing the most elegant bullet points possible. You should just write what you believe is valuable for an employer to know. Once you have written down all of your thoughts without second-guessing them, then you can go back through and make any necessary edits.

10 – 20 Minutes: Restructure

Think about whether the organization of your resume still makes sense. For instance, if you first put together this resume initially right after you graduated, you likely had little in terms of past experience to report. With little professional information to illustrate, you most likely listed your education towards the top.

Now that you have some post-graduation experience in the workplace, you will want to change your resume to start with your work history, starting with your most recent job, moving chronologically backwards. If you are looking to change fields or careers, you will also want to alter the order of experience, listing the most relevant information to the new career towards the top.

If the order in which you list your employment experience makes sense, but there is too much of it, you will want to consider cutting it down to an extent. Focus on keeping just those former employment history items which pertain in value to the new position you are trying to obtain, and drill down to what you are attempting to emphasize. You would also consider cutting out any bullet points which occurred during your college career, as they are less of a representation of your professional experience.

20 – 30 Minutes: Edit

Now it is time to make edits. Start by running a spell check. Good grammar and proper spelling go a long way for anybody reading your resume. Make sure you are not missing any words or using improper punctuation. Speaking of punctuation, you should decide whether you want to put periods at the end of your bullet points or not, and whichever way you decide to go, make sure that it is consistent throughout the document.

Finally, focus on any small, nuanced, nitty-gritty details that may need adjustments. These small fixes and final touches, making sure everything is clean looking, consistent, and professional, will go a long way to hide the fact that you have only used a half hour to make these changes.

If you feel that your resume is still a little too long, cut off the earliest professional working experience. If it happened the longest time ago, it is likely to be the least relevant to your cause.

Bonus Resume Update Tip

Now that you have your resume content polished and proofread why not to take it one extra step further. Update your resume layout with a modern look. Pick a resume template that you like and just copy paste your information in. Now your resume is updated and polished to a T.

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