Creative Commons LicenseThis tutorial by Liz Rodrigues, Humanities and Digital Scholarship Librarian at Grinnell College, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Table of Contents

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  1. What this training covers
  2. Identifying transferable skills
  3. Representing your skills
  4. Tips for writing bullet points
  5. Going further
  6. Resources
  7. Acknowledgements

What this training covers

This training assumes you already know the basics of creating a resumé. The tasks focus on representing your work as a Vivero Digital Scholarship Fellow on your resumé and in your cover letter. The steps outlined here can be used for other work and educational experiences, though, preparing you to have a bank of jobs/experiences, accomplishments related to those experiences, and transferable skills gained from those experiences to draw from as you tailor your resume to specific job applications.

Identifying transferable skills

The Psychology@IUPUI Guide to Transferable Skills defines: “Transferable skills are areas of development that will transfer from one environment to another such as home, school, work, volunteerism or extra-curricular activities.” Some examples of transferable skills:

When it comes to applying to jobs, your initial reaction might be “oh, I’ve never been a [fill in the blank] before, so I might not be qualified,” but if you think carefully about your transferable skills, you might realize that you do have experience performing key tasks related to a new job.

Task: Create a skill inventory related to your work as a Vivero Fellow
  1. List all of the jobs you have had as a Vivero Fellow and the tasks that these jobs have required.
  2. You could think of Vivero as one big job, with tasks such as peer-mentoring and project work, or you could think of each part of Vivero as a job, such as project work with the tasks being things like communicate with project lead, wireframe a website, learn WordPress. 
  3. For each of these tasks, list the skills acquired and used to perform it.
  4. For inspiration, consult the list in the IUPUI Guide to Transferable Skills.
  5. If you are doing this during a drop-in shift, partner with another Vivero Fellow to think about additional tasks and skills that you might have missed.

Example map structure:

 

Example of a skill inventory map

Source: Psychology@IUPUI Guide to Transferable Skills

 

Representing your skills

On a resumé, you will likely represent these skills and tasks as bullet points underneath a job entry. 

Task: Comparison
  1. Compare the two ways of representing a job and its skills listed below.
  2. Which sounds better, and why?

Example 1:

Digital Scholarship Fellow 

Example 2:

Fellow, Native Histories Project (url of project here) 

Vivero Digital Scholarship Fellows Program, Grinnell College 

 

Tips for resumé bullet points

Task: Writing bullet points
  1. Draft resumé bullet points for your Vivero project work.
  2. Don’t worry about having too many at this time. Try to have at least one bullet point for each transferable skill. 
  3. Review what you have drafted:
    1. Did you use action verbs?
    2. Are the bullet points connected to transferable skills?
    3. Have you specified the outcome or impact of each task?
  4. If you are doing this during a drop-in shift, partner with another Vivero Fellow to compare bullet points and consider alternate ways of presenting similar skills.

Going further

 

Resources

 

Acknowledgements

This training is based on a workshop developed in collaboration with Dr. Katie Walden and Rachel Edwards Harvith in 2018.

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