Putting together your résumé can be a fairly tedious and draining task. It’s also a task that requires you to take a close look at your life and career so far, which can be similarly daunting. Unfortunately, the stakes are pretty high, with your prospects of employment often depending mostly if not entirely on your résumé and how effectively it translates and highlights your skills, your past work, and your future prospects.
The résumé is of particular importance for coatings contractors and other paint and sealant technicians. A lot of this is because the traditional notion of a job interview is far less useful in this line of work than it is in others. There may be an interview with a prospective company or client, but it will be mostly to check that you are an agreeable and presentable individual, rather than to learn anything more about your ability in the field. Therefore, your résumé needs to be the focal point of your application, the centerpiece that you use to show them how good a worker you would be. With such importance resting on the résumé for coatings contractors, let’s take a look at what needs to be done to put your best foot forward.
Professionalism Always
Because a lot of jobs that you’ve worked on may seem similar when it comes to your résumé, you may be reluctant to put the same effort into the document that someone going into an office job might. This is the wrong attitude to have. A business résumé is laid out to translate skills, relevant information, and experience efficiently. A coatings or painting contractor’s résumé should adhere to the same guidelines — if anything, with an even stricter sense of purpose. This relates to the aforementioned weight of the interview process.
In business, there might be an interview that is completely vital in making the decision about a candidate who, on paper, looks excellent. Your experience and skills, though, when formatted and presented correctly, can speak for themselves somewhat more in the coatings industry.
Tailor Made
Though this isn’t what you want to hear in terms of how it will impact your overall workload, doing the extra work to tailor your résumé for each job you apply to should give you a big step up over your competition. As a coatings contractor, you are unlikely to be applying to hundreds of jobs constantly, in the way that a software engineer might. They’re far more likely to pick your application based on how well your skill set meets their needs. “So much of hiring a coatings contractor is centered on the impression that their résumé gives off what they can do, and how that relates to the job they are being hired for. This is a good enough reason in itself to make sure that your résumé has been adapted to fit the job description, emphasizing the elements to your candidacy that are most pertinent,” explained Howard Liman, résumé proofreader at OxEssays. Put in the extra work for an extra boost in your prospects.
Go Backwards
Painting jobs have developed across the last couple of decades. The industry has changed a considerable amount, and the methodology surrounding paint and coating application has evolved over time. When you are putting together your résumé, your focus is most likely going to be on your skill set in relation to your experience. Experience listed clearly and concretely is going to be your biggest pull, since it gives an employer a clear indication of what you can really do.
When listing your experience, you always want to go in reverse, starting with your most recent jobs. Though this anti-chronological ordering isn’t what makes sense, intuitively speaking, it makes sense from a psychological standpoint. Your most recent jobs are the ones where you will have been up to date on the principles of your craft, and they show that you are an active and relevant worker who won’t be behind on issues of basic compliance. This order still allows you to show off any cool projects you completed at the start of your career, but only after you’ve shown how up to date you are. Your education would be listed after your experience.
If you have no painting experience, it will all be different. You will want to emphasize translatable skills and only after you have listed your education section, which would take top billing.
Write It Well
Making spelling or grammar mistakes on your résumé is as costly as it is in any other type of job application. You need a flawless approach to this, since it can be damaging.
First, it looks bad. It won’t make people think you don’t know how to spell, since we are in an era of autocorrect and word processors. Instead, it will make you look sloppy and uninterested in securing the job. It shows a certain laziness that will be taken into account.
Secondly, it will affect how clearly the information you want them to know is translated. Problems with your writing could cause confusion and uncertainty. With all this said, it’s important to note that writing a résumé is hard for anyone. So here are some tools to help you get started:
Get Started!
Hopefully this list will give you a great sense of how to get started with your coating or painting résumé. It’s important to know exactly what you are trying to get across and to adapt your résumé according to what your prospective employer or client is looking for.
About the Author:
Chloe Bennet is a résumé editor at Academized and Assignment Writing Service websites where she devotes herself to writing and proofreading résumés. She also tutors at the Paper Fellows portal.