When someone tells you to write out a resume, you’re probably asking yourself “What good is that going to do me? I wouldn’t have anything to put in it!” This is where you’re wrong. As a homeschooler, you should already have the skills and community experience necessary to write out a decent resume. And of course, you’ll be building on it over the years as you go through college and gain more work experience.
First, you’re going to be opening up a word processor (i.e. Word, OpenOffice). The important thing here is to create a template that can be looked over and understood within 20 seconds. To do this, you must have everything organized into sections, taking advantage of any white space there is on each page. For an example, click this link. At the top of the page, center-aligned, you will be putting in your full name, street address, city and state and zip code, email address, and phone number on 5 separate lines. Your full name will be in bold and text size will be slightly larger than the four lines below it. By the way, if your email address is something like funkymonkey28@yahoo.com or masterchief343@hotmail.com, you may want to change it to something a little more professional such as your first and last name.
The rest of your resume will be spilt up into sections with everything under each section listed in a bulleted format. Any dates that you list will be flushed to the right margin of the document.
Objective. Will likely be very short, maybe one or two sentences long, such as “Obtain a job that involves working with customers in a fast-paced, high pressure environment.”
Education. This will be a bit tricky being that you’re homeschooled. Many community colleges offer duel enrollment to students who are currently in high school or within that level, so the best thing you can do is start taking a couple low level college courses. That way, you can put your community college in this field. For information on what courses you should take, check out my post on enrolling at a community college.
Work Experience. If you have none, then omit this one.
Honors. Any awards, notaries, or academic memberships you may have gained.
Volunteer Experience. This will be the most important one for you. If you’re not currently volunteering anywhere, you should start now. Since you’re not tied down by the expectations of public schooling, the best thing you can be doing for yourself is getting involved in the community.
Skills. You don’t want to hold back on this. List everything that you’ve done or know that you are capable of doing. Here’s a few you can choose from: Works Well with Others, Persistent, Team Oriented, Plans Ahead, Organized, Deals Well with Pressure, Adaptable/Flexible. For more, check out this list.
Now you should be able to effectively design a resume. Fix it up, make it look nice. I would even suggest showing it to a few people to see what they think and gain feedback on ways to improves it. You want to make sure it’s presentable to the employers that will be looking at it.
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