Resumes are essential. If you want to have any kind of professional working experience, then you need to prove that you deserve it. More often than not, you prove yourself with a single sheet of paper--a single sheet that shall determine your destiny. Or, at the very least, help you to make a good first impression!

Your resume is what gets you an interview. It is what catches a potential employer's eye and sets you apart from all of the other applicants. So, needless to say, you should put a fair amount of effort into making your resume represent you at your very best.

An important first step is to figure out what to include and what to exclude. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself if it is relevant and recent. If you are looking for a job at a daycare center, then it may be a good idea to mention all of the babysitting experience you have gained in the last three years. However, if you want to be a cashier at a department store, then it probably doesn't matter that you used to watch your neighbor's kids when you were in middle school. It is this streamlining of employment history that helps your future boss determine whether or not you've got what it takes. You want to cut to the heart of who you are and what you've got to offer while keeping in mind that the average resume gets skimmed over in less than 20 seconds.

Cutting out extraneous details is a must, but the effectiveness of changing a seemingly useless experience around to sound as important as possible should not be underestimated. Resumes are all about wording. Mentioning your "well-developed people skills" and "ability to react decisively in high pressure situations" is certainly applicable to customer service (and a department store cashier job). Suddenly that time little Georgie got his head caught in the banister and you had to explain to his parents why he had a sore neck has become a valuable learning experience that you can transfer to the workplace.

Poor little Georgie.(image courtesy of The Onion)

It is important to remember that you learn from everything. Leave out jobs that have nothing to do with your intended career path, or were so long ago that you cannot even remember your supervisor's name, but do not totally discount an experience without carefully considering the impact that it had on you. Even the most mundane tasks require that you show up and complete them, which teaches "accountability" and "time management". See? It's all about the wording!

A cautionary tale about lying on your resume. Please do not include anything that you cannot truthfully and thoughtfully discuss with an interviewer!

Some templates to help you with basic resume structure and outline.

Explains how to strategically target the job that you want as you are writing your resume.

They are asking for a CV? What is that??

And finally just some basic dos and don'ts of resumes.