GDA Lecture: The Resume Workshop

On March 20th, Tyler Dockery spoke to the GDA on Wake Tech’s Main Campus in the Engineering and Technology Building (ETB).

GDA Lecture: The Resume Workshop

The resume workshop began quickly, because we planned to view over 160 resumes in the short time we had.

Beginning with IIT’s 100 master candidate resumes, we glanced over the resumes of 100 individuals with design experience cover 1-2 decades in the field. We found them to be informative, but sedate, and not at all exciting. We found them to contain lots of information, but very, very little in the way of information that would tell us about the individual. Most students actually agreed we should skim through them faster, and that it would be easy to get lost in this shuffle of papers.

Next, we focused on 60 designs I pulled from my own sources. These gave an individual grasp quickly and easily, telling us about the individual even before we could focus on the writing involved. Students overwhelmingly decided what they liked about these designs quickly and easily. Not all were winners, and it was easy to see why or why not.

Students found that flashier resumes could quickly give the intent of the designer to the individual who would be hiring them. They agreed that one of these resumes would quickly and easily stand out in a stack of the other resumes.

We finished the discussion by talking about what careers the students wanted to pursue and how they might go about showing that thorough their resumes. Marsha Mills discussed the importance of what you say and how you say it, and the double importance of having a separate resume for web design work and graphic design work, and possible photographic or illustrative jobs. Students left with the clear understanding of how a resume is really a typographic problem, but also how it can affect their overall perception.