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Whether you’re suddenly unemployed or just looking to change up, starting out in a new career is daunting. Take our advice on how to write—and plan—your way into a new field.

Jump to a New Career with a Killer Resume and Plan

A good tip from GetHiredNowTV’s Channel on YouTube:

In the digital age, our resumes like many of our personal documents are stored online and in a digital format. If you belong to a job search site which stores your resume, such as Monster.com, your information is kept in a huge database and is only found when it matches specific keywords. You need to make sure that your resume is found.

Brian Krueger from collegegrad.com offers advice on this topic in this one-minute video tip:

Resume Finesse: Tell Me Again, Why Did You Leave Your Last Job After Six Months?

That’s not a question you want to field during an important job interview, especially if the details are gory. And why would you be asked such a question? Because you included it on your resume so that it would be sure to come up during the interview!

A resume isn’t just a bunch of facts typed up neatly. A resume presents the best picture of you, the professional. A good resume shines a spotlight on your business accomplishments while sweeping your shortfalls and shortcomings under the carpet (or at least putting the best face on these ‘difficult’ resume entries.)

The Fudge Factor

There’s a big difference between emphasizing career highlights and creating highlights that never took place.

During your last semester of college you dropped out to tour as a roadie with Aerosmith. Good times. But, you never quite went back to get that degree. You almost got it, but not quite.

You might be tempted to apply the fudge factor here and claim a degree that you haven’t quite earned. Don’t do it. Your resume must be 110% accurate in every fact. However, what facts are included or excluded and how the remaining facts are positioned are simply aspects of good resume preparation.

Resume Blemish #1: 12 Jobs in Four Years

You quit for a better job, got laid off, downsized, moved across country and picked up an additional certification so your staying power at any one position is rightfully suspect to a prospective employer.

Pick the jobs that are most relevant to the one for which you’re applying. No lies. Just put your relevant experience to the forefront.

Provide accurate employment start and end dates and when the subject comes up during an interview, you’ll be prepared to explain the holes in your work history. This brings up blemish number two.

Resume Blemish #2: Holes in Your Work History

Prospective employers like to see a nice, steady work history with nice, steady advancement as you move from company to company: more responsibilities, more varied experience, and greater impact on the company’s bottom line. (It all comes down to the bottom line.) That’s what your next employer is looking for.

So how do you explain the fact that you left your last job in the previous millennium? Or that two year block of time when you hiked through the Andes?

Holes like this stand out, but they can be addressed in your cover letter. Again, honesty counts, so be truthful. You’ve been out of the workforce since 1999 raising your family, and now, you’re ready to re-enter the job market (with your completely up-to-date skill set). Or, you wanted to follow your dream to trek the Andes before you got too old. Straight up, tell the truth.

The Resume Statute of Limitations

Typically, you can leave off anything older than 10 years. In today’s job market, anything before that is ancient history. So, if you had a few “misfires” early in your career, leave them off.

Also, if your most relevant experience also happens to be your most recent (usually the case as you work your way up the ladder), you can omit that old two-year stint as a bank teller before you got into marketing. Again, the key is to choose selectively the information that best demonstrates your value as the company’s newest employee.

Finally, the Details

Read it. Reread it. Read it again. Have your spouse read it, the kids, or your mother-in-law – anybody you can collar. You’re looking for input and reaction. Does it grab your attention? Does this sound right? Edit and polish each entry accordingly.

Proof it. No mistakes. No spelling errors, grammar’s up to snuff, proper format. If it’s professional, it’s perfect.

Don’t Try This at Home

If you don’t have a clue how to structure your work history and play down your job-jumping binge, hire a professional resume preparer. It’ll cost a few bucks, but it’ll be the best investment in your future you ever make.

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Teena Rose is a columnist, public speaker, and certified/published resume writer with Resume to Referral. She’s authored several books, including How to Design, Write, and Compile a Quality Brag Book, 20-Minute Cover Letter Fixer, and Cracking the Code to Pharmaceutical Sales.

A new website, Jobs In Pods offers a new way to search for jobs…through podcasts.

Now you can download the podcasts to your iPod or MP3 player and listen to job descriptions while in traffic, at the gym, or anywhere else. While this might seem like a strange way for a company to post a job or for a job seeker to look for employment, there is quite about this concept that makes sense.

From the site’s “Why Do It” page:

What makes podcasting an attractive recruiting tool? The format offers a way to get candidates to listen to what organizations have to say. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but nothing speaks like a human voice.

Portability and flexibility are also factors. Because podcasts can be downloaded to portable, lightweight devices, the technology provides an opportunity to reach an audience at their convenience–which means they’ll be more inclined to really listen.

Podcasts are particularly appealing to younger candidates. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that recruiting sites aimed at this audience have been among the first to add podcasts.

Try it out!

GetHiredNowTV has a video that has some good tips for doing job searches via Google.

Simply putting in a job title and city will bring you back millions of results. The video provides some tips on narrowing down those options a bit. Using terms like “submit resume” along with the job title and other keywords will likely bring good results.

The video is about two and a half minutes.

Dan Kegel has an outstanding guide for Computer Science graduates looking for a job out of school. He notes that in his experience of interviewing hundreds of programmers, that many of them are “woefully unprepared” for the whole interview process.

The page has the following segments:

• What Interviewers are Tired Of
• What Interviewers Look For
• What This Means For You
• But How Can I Get Experience Without a Job?
• Quick Reality Check

There are a number of useful links and resources on the page as well. If you’re a programmer looking for a job, take a few minutes and review this page!

A couple weeks ago we looked at Jobby as another online resource for job hunting. Today we’re going to summon the vast power of Google and harness it for job hunting purposes.

Google Base is an online, searchable database, which people can use to upload almost anything. Here’s what it looks like:

You’ll notice there in the second column to the left, right at the top of the column, there is a link to “Jobs”. It brings up a page where you set the terms of what you’re looking for in the jobs posted to Google Base.

The options listed (If you can’t squint hard enough to read that screen shot) are as follows:

Location: (within XXX miles of Zipcode)

Job Function: (Tech jobs right now)

Employer: (About 20 listed so far)

Job Industry: (20 choices here)

Job Type: (Full Time, Permanent, w-2 Contractor)

Education: (4 year college or high school)

You can also choose to get your result by most recent posting, or by relevance.

After you put in your information and search, you’re brought to a pretty neat results screen which not only lists the jobs, but also provides a map of your area with the jobs that came up highlighted and marked on the map:

Right now, there’s not a whole lot of jobs in Google Base, but it’s probably something you want to keep an eye on for the future. If companies keep adding to it, it could be a very useful took for scouting out available jobs in the area and their relation to you as far as distance. Keep checking back, and if you’re in the middle of a job hunt, why not give it a whirl, you ever know what you might come up with.

One of the things we want to do here at Jobaloo.com is to help keep you informed of the latest services and technologies out there designed to help you in the job market. Today we’re taking a look at a new site that is currently in Beta, Jobby.

The site promises that creating a profile with them “is like an online resume on steroids.” First, you sign up for a profile, and you can upload your resume to the site for storage. You’ll also want to pay attention to the “10,000 foot view” which will appear at the top of your profile and is the “at a glance” version of you that possible employers are going to see first. Then you go through and select a number of “tags” that serve as keywords to help employers and hiring managers to find you.

Here’s a screenshot looking at how you set up your profile:

You look through the tag cloud there and click on ones that apply to you. You click once on a tag, and it is placed in the “Newbie” box below, click twice and goes into the “Skilled” box, three times and you’re “Advanced”.

This was the “geek” tab, you go through a similar procedure for “Business”, “Design” and “Availability”. Once you’ve applied all the tabs that can possibly fit you, go ahead and save your profile. When you look at it, it will look like this:

Whomever is interested in you as a potential candidate can see when your resume was last uploaded, can download the resume, browse through your skill tags and contact you securely through the form. Hopefully this means no spam! For this demo, I uploaded a resume template from Microsoft with the name of “Max Benson” thus the name on the file.

The power of Jobby comes when hiring managers are looking to search for candidates. It’s pretty easy to put in exactly what they’re looking for in skills for a candidate and then search for those skills. They can filter the results by area or by any of the “tags” that we went through before.

Jobby also has more cool things in the works. They promise to soon have a wizard which will “allow companies and recruiting firms to create their very own version of Jobby.” This means that they will be able to embed a version of Jobby into their websites and allow candidates to do all of the above right on the company’s webpage. They offer this sample webpage which shows you what the wizard might be able to do for a school focused on education and experience and looking to add to their faculty.

A few last things:

• As the site is still in beta, it is important to note that “GoJobby.com is currently only serving up profiles for exactly one career type… “Web Geek”.“
• Be sure to check out the Jobby Blog for updates on the service as it develops.
• There is also a Wordpress Plugin available for Jobby which allows you to embed your Jobby Profile on your Wordpress blog

Conclusion: The site and technology is certainly very much in the Web 2.0 spirit. “Tags” are the in thing these days on the web, and Jobby allows to slap tags on yourself and personalize what tags best describe your skills and situation. If this site/service is able to take off and get wide participation from both job seekers and employers, it could be a very powerful tool for both. Initially, Jobby might find a bigger distribution through individual employers and especially recruiting firms, which would then be able to find ideal matches to fill openings.

From Dice.com

The article tells us that the employer needs to be able to scan your resume and get a feel for your qualifications and experience within 10 seconds of picking it up and looking at it. When many job openings these days attract hundreds, if not thousands of respondents, being able to see at a glance that you are a qualified is critical to your chances of getting to the next step in the process.

To make your resume easy to scan, they recommend that you break it down into five sections:

Section 1: Summary of Qualifications

Example Given:

* 8 years of experience leading network security for Fortune 500 companies.
* Credentials include CCIE Routing & Switching and CCIE Security.
* Areas of expertise include firewall, storage networking, and access routing.

Section 2: Technical Skills

Systems: Windows (2000/NT/XP), Linux, UNIX, Solaris 2.x
Hardware: Servers, Hubs, Routers, Switches, PCs
Software: MS Office Suite, MS SQL Server, Visio
Networking: TCP/IP, LAN/WAN, Ethernet, Token Ring
Languages: Visual Basic, C, C++, HTML, JavaScript
Technologies: VoIP (SIP protocol, SER, asterisk)

Section 3: Experience

* Led seamless migration from Windows 95/98/NT 4.0 to Windows 2000/XP and Office 97/2000 to Office 2003 for 750 desktops.
* Developed diagnostic tools to troubleshoot network failures, resulting in 40% fewer service lapses.
* Served as primary Help Desk Technician, resolving 250 trouble tickets daily.

Section 4: Education and Certifications

The most attractive selling points of this section include your highest school level completed, as well as all of your certifications.

Section 5: Keywords

Resumes are often scanned and put into an electronic database. The article recommends:

To get past the OCR challenge and make sure your resume lands in the hands of a hirer, a keywords section on your resume is vital. Use this section to include alternate job titles you’re applying for, areas of expertise, and other skills not cited elsewhere on your resume. List your keywords at the very bottom of your resume. Examples of keywords for a Tech Support professional’s resume might include: Help Desk, Technical Support Technician, Tech Support, Troubleshoot, and Call Center.