The post 8 Ways to Make your Work experience stand out among other US Mba Applications – Part 2 appeared first on Jamboree India.
Showcase Diversity in Professional Experience without giving the impression that you have tried too many things because of INDECISION. Of course, you would like to showcase all your diverse experience – all the full time jobs you have held, all the entrepreneurial activities that you have led, all the social impact work you have done and all the extra-curricular work that makes you a more rounded character.
However, it is not always best to spend equal amounts of Application space on each of these. components; you definitely want to come across as someone who has done many things, but not necessarily as someone who has spent all your energy in every new thing that comes by, someone who may not be completely sure what he / she wants to do.
A good way to balance both urgencies, and have the best of both worlds, is usually to pick one highlight of your professional experience – usually the company / place at which you are currently working. This should be given the most space, and should ideally have the most impressive credentials. You can then choose two other big parts of professional experience – depending on your profile, these could be previous jobs, internships, freelance work, non profit work, and so on. When you describe these, be careful to include as many references to other professional assets that you possess; they should paint a picture of you as a skilled professional, with talents in many different areas.
This is often much more productive than spending a couple of lines each on ten different professional achievements, and coming out at the end of it without making too much impact at all.
When someone from an Admissions Board speed reads your resume, he / she does so at great speed. The only things that are retained in such a reading are impactful facts, and the greatest impact comes through facts which are quantified by numbers. The temptation to avoid numbers is greatest when talking about work experience: we have seen many resumes where the first line of each section of professional experience is purely words, and tries to explain the role of the person in that career segment. It is always best to combine such a point with achievement in the point; even if you got results in the top 20% of those achieved in previous years, it is best to let your readers know, rather than get lost in a mass of irrelevant detail.
The key skill here is not to scrap everything that you have written on your experience and start afresh: it is to be able to attach an impact estimate number to everything you have done. Therefore, if you are writing about your work as an analyst in your present place of work, talk about hiring numbers and percentiles, and how it was an achievement even to make it there, when you are explaining the role. When you are talking about the fact that you were given a pre-placement offer in a key internship, also provide details of the impact numbers that led to the offer being made, and use data to prove that very few people are given such an offer. At every step, try to pair action verbs with numbers so that your description of your own work experience comes across as the powerful thing it undoubtedly is.
The post 8 Ways to Make your Work experience stand out among other US MBA Applications – Part 2 appeared first on Jamboree India.
