8 – Innovate YOUR Resume

Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of Innovate Your Life with Mary Michael. I am your host Mary Michael and I support your efforts to tame chaos with mini-innovate blueprints to get you further and faster to doing the things you want and love to do…

Did you know that the average duration of a job is just 2 years? If you have a career of 30 years that is over 15 or more jobs! With the job landscape constantly changing and evolving – there has never been a better time to harness the powers of branding yourself and resume.

Studies have shown if you can brand yourself – you are more likely to get a job.

There is an article published on Science Daily called:

‘Brand Me’ presentations increase students’ confidence and enhance their employability

The University of Portsmouth is helping its students build a strong personal brand to increase their confidence and enhance their employability.

A new study, published in the journal Studies in Higher Education, has shown how ‘Brand Me’ presentations in the University’s Faculty of Business & Law have led to an increase in students’ employability-related self-confidence (ERSC).

A ‘Brand Me’ presentation is a two/three minute elevator pitch in which students sell themselves to a prospective employer.

“By the end of the process there was an improvement in performance and confidence.

“The study also suggests that self-confidence can be developed through targeted interventions, which brings practical implications in terms of career management teaching.”

Today we are exploring how to take charge of your resume! If you are like me, I don’t like to talk about myself or write my resume but I changed that by every year I started to make time and just do a ‘resume boot camp’ so I would be ready to jump if I saw an opportunity. I have created a resume template and I want to share this with you and it is completely free. I have helped 100s if not 1000s by now overcome their writers block with this resume. It is completely free. We have a link in the shownotes. So if you are driving don’t worry – just make sure to visit www.innovateyoulife.today and look under blueprints.

Alright I am going to walk you through exercises to change your mindset on writing a resume … then go step by step through transforming your resume into a Rockstar!

Ok let’s go!

I can relate to how it must feel to start a project from scratch. How do you feel when it comes time to writing your resume? Frustrated? Overwhelmed? Not sure where to begin?
Is this how you feel when it comes to writing a resume?

• Maybe you were laid off and feel like the clock is ticking away
• Feeling frustrated – Do you work for a bad boss and you just want to move on
• Feeling like there is so much more in life to do
• Or maybe you just want to expand your career options

Don’t feel frustrated for one more second.
We all have a story!

Let’s Begin To Harness Your SuperPowers!
Warm Up Exercise 1:

Can you think of one strength or ‘super power’ that someone has told you have?

Here are some examples:

• A great motivator
• Good at writing compelling content
• Great at visuals
• Excellent at strategy or campaign management

Let me read you one of my many complements and let’s dissect it.

 Phenomenal meeting with the client, the client was literally signing our praises!    He wants to expand our conversations to the extended our offering to the rest of his team, as we have to slowly rebuild our reputation with them (our project was nearly in the can before Mary gave new life).

From this complement – what can we dissect from it?

• Strengthens client relationships
• Building strong client relations
• Mary brings compelling actionable insights to improve client success

Now tell yourself one experience in which you had success with your superpower?

• Example: Motivation: I recruited and lead a team at Company SuperPowers and they were all excited to make a change in the organization and empower our customers!
• I was a key leader in transforming the marketing efficiency of a company by leading with actionable insights to allow for constant delivery to the client without compromising quality. This resulted in saving the company $1M in supplier fees by creating standardized templates and processes to cut costs in just one year.

Warm Up Exercise 2: Who is your role model?

Who is your role model?

• Ellen Degenerous
• Oprah
• Bill Gates

Who is your role model in your career? Is there someone who a good leader in your industry?

• Look at an association or maybe there is a company that has a great culture?
• My good friend,  she is a part of Disruptive Women in Healthcare and founder of CEO of her own company. She leads by innovation through her studies.

Can you find them on LinkedIn?

• Yes

Can you pick out the qualities that motivates you?

• Creating a positive change, an agent of transformation, empowering the customer with exceptional digital customer experience,
• Her profiles says …

I like action movies and superheroes. Iron Man, Superman, Iron Man, Batman, and more Iron Man.   No wonder Robert Downey, Jr.’s comment in a Wmagazine interview – that he had a ‘pit crew’ of people helping him – caught my eye!In his own words, he was “…a Ferrari, not a Ford and it took a ‘pit crew’ to keep him on the road.”  His remark led me to explore my ‘pit crews.’  Since then, I’ve seen that ‘pit crews’ are actually networks and for more than a decade have worked with individuals and businesses to help them explore theirs. – NetworkSage.

Warm Up Exercise 3: Key Questions to Ask

What motivates you?

• Creating process and taming chaos

What do you absolutely hate to do?

• Taxes

What gets you up in the morning?

• Helping others achieve their dreams

What do you want your purpose to be?

• Leading a positive change for busy moms

Why are you leading?

• Because I can help tame the chaos in life with mini-blueprints that allow others to spend time doing what they love to do …
• Or in my real world job – I enjoy leading because in healthcare we make a change in the patients we serve. We save lives, we help relieve symptoms. In life we all need help and if I can get a message out quicker through digital means to our customers, then I am helping change customer experience.

Unleash the resume template!

• Ok now that you are warmed up!
• Let’s compile your resume components

Step 1: Skills in 3 Words Max

Skills

• Write down all the skills you have! Need some help? Look on LinkedIn – how are your peers wording this? How are your colleagues wording this? Can you find someone at another company? Can you find someone above you? Can you find someone in your general industry?
• Enterprise Commercial Management
• Scaled Agile for Large Enterprises
• Salesforce Platform Experience
• Watson Platform Experience
• VP of Digital Transformation

Now let’s bucket them in 3 columns!

Look at people in your industry and then group them accordingly

• Data Driven
• Global Project Leadership
• Technology Experience

Here is my example of 3 buckets

Step 2: Your Experience

Start with your first experience:

Lead with Results! Then describe

• Dream Corp., VP of Strategy & Innovation (2018 – Present) – Inclouds, NY
• $2M in revenue generated in Q1 sales, directly tied to strategic multi-channel marketing knowledge of utilizing audience data to create actionable insights and engagement through email and audience level data.
• Optimized therapeutic and brand specific consulting for actionable engagement with advanced strategies that included email and data integration into existing client platforms web analytic tools, marketing automation platforms, campaign management platforms and suggestion engines (machine learning or AI).

What is the jobs you are interested in looking at?

• Can you apply to the different situations? Can you describe it differently?
• Can you make more than one version based on the flavor of experience?

Look on LinkedIn – see how your colleagues are writing this? Look at another person in another company?

• Look how job descriptions are describing where you would like to go ..
• For me it could be “VP of Digital Transformation” – what are the words they use to describe the industry or position – “prioritization to drive impact”

Step 3: Develop an Executive Summary

Summarize how you are going to be a game changer super hero at the next organization!

Ready? Here are examples:

HIGH LEVEL WHAT?

• Leading a positive change in healthcare or your industry
• Think about how do you lead? How do you show up?

HOW?

• Evolving and simplification in global IT for large enterprises
• By rapidly evolving efficiencies for speed to market of marketing campaigns at an enterprise level

RESULT TO END CUSTOMER?

• Using ‘big data’ and AI to evolve the customer experience

Step 4: Fill in the pieces

• Education:
• Languages:
• Special Certifications:
• Scaled Agile
• Project Management

Step 5: Find your personal branding

• Find an image that is YOU
• Find an elevator pitch that is YOU
• As we saw from the study published in Science Daily …

The University of Portsmouth is helping its students build a strong personal brand to increase their confidence and enhance their employability.

The students had to give ‘Brand Me’ presentations at the beginning, middle and end of the module. Measurements of ERSC were taken at each stage from a sample of 105 full-time students in the 2015/2016 academic year. A carefully trained team of mock employers, made up of anonymous reviewers with experience of the recruitment process, scored the presentations in pairs against measurements such as:

• the student has presented a range of relevant qualities;

• the student talks positively about themselves;

• the student uses confident language; and

• the student uses a confident tone of voice and body language.

Bonus: LinkedIn

Now take all the elements you created and match on LinkedIn, build your profile. Brand yourself!

• Do you have papers you have created? Make sure they are not sensitive or copy righted or company property.
• Can you share a link to others of work you have done?

One Page Template in PowerPoint