Personam resume

Your major writing assignment for this unit is to write a resume for yourself.

Often we do not know what kinds of jobs we will be asked to do in our lives. Many of us train assiduously in school for a particular job in life. We may want to be a doctor, a lawyer, a plumber, a race car driver, a homemaker, or an astronaut. However, because our world is changing so rapidly, we often find that the skills which we work to learn in order to accomplish one task can be transferred to our ability to do another.

I know a young man who went to University to train to be a structural engineer. In the summer between his junior and senior year, he took a part time job as the Best Boy on a movie crew. He worked with the gaffer (the electrician) on the movie. By the end of the summer he found he loved his work so much that after he completed his degree in his senior year and graduated, he went to work full time for the gaffer and today is the second in command of electronics on several commercial and movie sets.

Had he been asked when he was a senior in high school where he would be earning his living five years hence, he certainly would not have thought that it would be on a movie set in the Philippines or in Mexico. However, those are two of the countries in which he has worked recently.

So when it comes time to write our resume that we will be submitting to various employers in our lives, it is essential that we include ALL our skills. We never know which ones will serve to bring positive attention in our work lives.

What we do know is that as we all begin high school and university, the jobs that we will be doing in the future in many cases don’t even exist today. Who would have thought three years ago that I-Pods would rule the ear drums of the world? And yet the salesman who sold me my little mp3 player had been trained in some specific human relations skills and some technical skills that allowed him to answer competently all my questions and to run my credit card through the machine when I went to pay for my purchase. When he was in university, he probably didn’t think he would be selling Apple products.

As you complete the Unit 6 major writing assignment, which is to write a resume, be sure to include ALL your skills, all the experiences you have had which might be of some use in any job for which you may apply some time in the future.

In order to tie this assignment with our reading this unit, consider the jobs of those characters about whom we have read. There was the management executive of a hospitality house, a gambler, a young cowman, a mother, her husband, a farmer, the chief of an Indian tribe who was a capable military leader and a diplomat and a public speaker, a miner, and the various characters from Huck Finn.

Assume for a moment that you, too, are a traveler who is looking for a new place in which to settle. As you move to your possible new home, you will be taking this resume with you in order to find a job that will support you while you settle in.