Beginners Guide to Creating a Resume

It’s difficult to be financially responsible if you don’t have finances to work with! And creating an eye-catching resume is a first step towards helping students with special needs find their first jobs. September’s National Revise Your Resume Day is the perfect time to help students create that important employment tool.

Getting Started

For students with special needs, creating a resume is not a 5-minute project, but that doesn’t mean that their final produce can’t be impressive enough to land a job. This lesson will provide an overview of what goes into a first resume and why they are important. Then you may want to approach each section of that resume (finding key words to impress the ATS readers, creating a branding statement, collecting examples of relevant experience from volunteerism and extra-curricular activities, transforming required courses into relevant education) in different lessons over a longer period of time.

Teaching the Lesson

1. Ask how many students are interested in getting a job. Discuss how an employer might choose which person to hire for a job and the attributes of a resume that matches what an employer needs. Introduce the video.

2. Hand out the worksheet “First Time Resume Skill Collector.” Tell students NOT to fill out this form yet but use it to track what the narrator is discussing in the video.

3. Watch “The Best Resume for Students with No Experience.”

4. Review each section of the “Resume Skill Collector” and ask students what they might put into each section or how they would find the information to include in that section.

5. Complete any section(s) that are appropriate for your group.

For More Information

If students need more information on creating a resume and/or preparing for their first job interviews support can be found from these workbooks in the Daily Living Skills series. Dress for Success, Seeking Employment, Interviewing Skills, or work on soft skills with Job Expectations.

And, while the lessons in this blog can stand alone, they work best when paired with the Financial Literacy course from Susan Traugh’s Transition 2 Life curriculum. This one-semester course is offered in both a special education edition and a companion text for general education students. Find it here!