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Resumes for the Construction Industry

Construction contractors are aware of popular misconceptions about the construction industry: that all the jobs are “dirty” jobs requiring only brute strength and that construction is just a job, not a career path. Those mistaken ideas about the construction industry overlook current building practices and such career prospects as:

  • Civil engineer: designs, builds, and supervises construction projects
  • Safety director: ensures a safe work environment and safe work procedures
  • Construction manager/engineer: plans, coordinates, and budgets the project
  • Construction estimator: estimates time, money, materials, and labor required for the project
  • Construction inspector: makes sure the building meets all codes, zoning regulations, and contract specifications

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has made the projection that these high-paying construction positions will increase between 7% and 10% per year over the next 10 years, which is considered faster than average.

While in the past some of the positions could be learned on the job, now all of them require a college education, internship, and sometimes licenses or certifications. Among the certifications that may be useful are LEED, Project Management Professional (PMP), and Certified Professional Constructor (CPC). Civil engineer, safety director, construction manager, construction estimator, and construction inspector jobs also require:

  • Leadership and negotiation skills
  • Technology skills, since so much data is kept, analyzed, and manipulated on computers from cost estimates and schedules to contracts
  • The ability to see a project to complete on time and on budget
  • The ability to understand and adhere to building codes and regulations
  • The ability to maintain positive relations with construction crews, architects, building owners, town and stage agencies, and others
  • Job-specific skills such as engineering, finance, and knowledge of state and local building regulations.

As for most careers, your resume should not simply list your education and skills but give specific details about the impact you had. For example, you should say exactly how many people you supervised, the exact size of the budget and project you oversaw, and the exact results of any problems that you solved or situations you mediated.

If you are starting your career or rising through the ranks in a construction industry profession, Robin’s Resumes® is ready to create a resume that will help you on your way.

Collaboration on Your Resume

According to a survey by Eagle Hill Consulting, employees spend 50 percent more time on collaborative work than they did 20 years ago. But what does “collaboration” mean, and how can your resume highlight your ability to collaborate?

What Collaboration Means

In collaborative working, two or more people in an organization work together to achieve a business goal or benefit. Usually, the people are at a similar level in the organization, though they may be from different departments or even different companies. A team may be collaborative, or it may not—a collaborative team brings together people with different skill sets to work on a common objective.

According to SmartSheet, only 88 percent of people prefer collaboration over competition. When collaboration is lacking, organizations become “siloed”—different parts of the organization refuse to share information with anyone else—and progress is often impossible as a result.

How to Highlight Collaboration on Your Resume

Because the work environment is so much more complex these days, stretching across borders and industries, companies recognize that collaboration is a necessity. Collaboration affects even the smallest businesses: when a local restaurant joins with other local restaurants to create a soup festival, they are collaborating.

To highlight your collaborative talents on your resume:

  • Specify if the teams you are on or lead consist of people with different skills and backgrounds. Remember, a team of individuals just like yourself is not necessarily collaborative; one that contains people with different backgrounds working to a common goal is collaborative.
  • Describe times when you reached across teams, departments, companies, or partners. When you reach outside your team or department to accomplish a goal, you are collaborative.
  • Share what you accomplished through collaboration. Having relationships with those outside your immediate team or area of expertise is great; even better is building those relationships to benefit your company.
  • Explain anything you did to improve collaboration. For example, you attended or set up a leadership course, or you gave people the tools they needed to collaborate better (such as a software program that improved communications).

You may have more collaborative examples and talents than you are aware of because collaboration has become such a common feature in today’s workplace. Let Robin’s Resumes® help you create a resume that shows the value you bring to a collaboration.

Writing a Great Resume Summary

Your resume summary is the first—and may be the only—part of your resume that hiring managers and recruiters read. To write a summary that makes them want to continue reading, you must gather information from job postings and advertisements in your field and on the sites of the companies you are interested in. Search for key skills and experience that the companies are looking for; these are the keywords that should appear in your summary.

Your summary should:

  1. Use a few but critical adjectives. Everyone applying for the job will be hard-working and able to work independently and as a team member. So look for adjectives that more closely match the job description (intrapreneurial, strategic) and use those sparingly.
  2. Offer specific instances of your success. Cherry-pick from among your accomplishments to highlight a few that speak directly to the goals of the company.
  3. List any essential licenses or degrees (MD, CFP, CPA) that the position requires.
  4. List languages you speak or countries you have worked in if you are pursuing a global career.
  5. Concentrate on accomplishments, not goals. The company you are applying to does not want to know that you are “looking to advance in an exciting, collaborative environment.” Hiring managers and recruiters want to know you can create an exciting, collaborative environment.
  6. Quantify as much as possible. Especially in sales and leadership positions, it is important to indicate how much you have contributed to revenue, cost savings, and other financial criteria.
  7. Keep the summary consistent with your online presence. You should not duplicate your online profile, but you should keep both up-to-date and consistent with each other.

When you are crafting your summary, it might help to first frame your career in an elevator (30-second) speech or in 1 or 2 sentences. You can then expand upon that theme in your summary, which should fit in the top quarter or third of your resume.

Writing a concise yet powerful summary is difficult. If you need the help of a professional, please contact Robin’s Resumes®.

Ten Easy Searches to Improve Your Resume

Word’s search feature can help you improve your resume by searching for the most common mistakes in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. This check is a vital step in making sure your resume is error-free. In response to a CareerBuilder survey, 58% of hiring managers and recruiters refused to read a resume with typos, immediately dismissing those candidates from any consideration for the job.

The following 10 easy searches will help track down typos on your resume.

  1. Search for “lead”—if the job is in the past, the word you want is “led.”
  2. Search for double spaces. After a period, you only need a single space.
  3. Search for a period outside the quotes (”.) In U.S. English, the period normally goes inside the quotes (.”).
  4. Search for the dollar sign ($). Make sure you are always referring to dollars the same way, preferably either million or M and either billion or B. If you use $200K in one place, do not use $200,000 in another place. Writing “$2,000 dollars” is wrong because the $ is all you need.
  5. Search for “company.” Word has a bad habit of wanting you to capitalize company any time it follows a noun (for example, “this insurance company…”). Company should only be capitalized if it is at the start of a sentence or part of a company name (BBB Insurance Company).
  6. Search for % and percent. Both are correct but choose one.
  7. Search for a hyphen after the letter e (as in e-commerce and e-mail). These days, the hyphen is rarely required. The preferred spellings are ecommerce and email.
  8. Search for United States, US, USA, and U.S. Again, any one of these is correct but be consistent in using one.
  9. Search for any punctuation mark that comes in a set. For example, you always need two quotation marks (“ ”), and you always need two parentheses ( ).
  10. Search for question marks (?). Normally, they should not appear in a resume.

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the many roles you have to play in creating a resume: marketing guru, expert writer, and master finder of typos on your resume? Contact Robin’s Resumes® for some much-needed help.

Is a Professional Resume Writer Worth the Cost

When most people are deciding whether a professional resume writer is worth the cost, they usually calculate the length of time they saved in hunting for a job. Get hired a month or two earlier, and they have a lot more income in the bank—far more than a professional resume writer costs.

But payback for using a professional resume begins earlier: A professionally written resume renews your confidence in your abilities, reminding you of how much you have actually accomplished over your career; gives you the right words for dealing with any problems in your work history; and helps you project a stronger, more accurate image during interviews.

When you are considering if a professional resume writer is worth the cost, take note of these important points about resumes:

  1. A resume is a marketing document. Are you confused about the line between marketing, bragging, exaggerating, and outright lying? Are you wondering whether to mention a gap in employment, how to handle a career transition, or write about another employment anomaly? Are you confident that you know what should be on your resume and what does not need to be there? A professional resume writer will give your resume focus, take care of anomalies, and highlight those parts of your employment record that will get you the job you want now.
  2. A resume is more than a history of tasks—it is a record of accomplishments. Do you have a brag book where you have kept track of your accomplishments? Do you remember how much you learned from each job in your past and how much you contributed? A professional resume writer will help you recall your achievements and put them in context.
  3. A poorly written resume is a reflection on you as a potential employee. Are you sure about punctuation, grammar, and spelling? Are you ready to double-check every acronym and company name in your resume or will you just assume that they are correct? Do the dates of employment lining up and have you consistently used the past tense for former jobs? A professional resume writer will make sure that your resume is error-free.
  4. A resume must communicate. Is your resume able to pass through Applicant Tracking Systems so that recruiters and hiring managers actually have a chance to read it? Are you able to present technical or scientific information in a way that recruiters and hiring managers can understand? Does your resume align with your social media presence, or do you need to rethink your online image? A professional resume writer can help you bridge any communications gap.

At Robin’s Resumes®, our professionally written resumes have been worth the cost to thousands of job seekers. We prepare resumes that propel our clients from inquiry to interview. Contact us today.