It’s amazing to me how seeing so many writers come in with their resumes has influenced me to reevaluate the transferable and unique skills I might be able to craft my resume with. I consider myself something of a jack-of-all-trades: I like a lot of different fields, and I have quite a few hands-on experiences with different technologies, which can be both a good and bad thing. Most workforces like their applicants and future employees to focus on the skills they’ve developed the most over time that are specifically related to the field they intend to work for.
At the end of Spring Quarter, my three years as a tutor at The UCWbL will come to an end. Graduation, internships, and job-searching have been at the forefront of my mind, and I wonder if others who are graduating at the end of Spring Quarter have asked themselves the same question: where can I apply my Writing Center skills?
We often think about our skills in terms of broad concepts (collaboration and teamwork, leadership and interpersonal skills, time management), but these need to be fine-tuned and more specific for resumes. There are many roles tutors can assume here at The UCWbL, and I want to talk about the ways you can communicate your responsibilities with more specificity for your resume. Generalizations are fine when you want to get your resume out into the world as a start, of course, but I’m particularly interested in exploring how you can effectively describe your skills when you have specific job fields and markets in mind.
For those of us who are Creative Writing, English, or even Business Majors, I have a few ideas about how we can apply the skills we’ve gained from working at The UCWbL to our future careers. Editing is the biggest marketable field that comes to mind, whether that be for newspapers, books or something else (not limited to print, of course).
Although we aren’t a resource for copy-editing exclusively, what we do at The UCWbL and what magazine editors, literary magazine editors, and other copy-editing positions do are closely linked. To be a copy-editor, you need a good grasp of the English language and all of its grammatical nuances. However, cosmetic work is not the only duty of a copy-editor. At The UCWbL, working with different writers on various types of writing gives us an edge. Exposure to and awareness of argumentation, persuasiveness and organization/structure are particularly valuable experiences. Even if the author is not taking an obvious stance on an issue, there’s usually some kind of argument (or at least a purpose) of the piece they’ve created embedded somewhere within their words. Editing is the field that I’m personally working toward, but I know there are other skills that we’ve developed at The UCWbL that can be applied in many other fields as well.
Although I’ve never had firsthand experience on a Team or led a Workshop, from what I’ve heard, observed, and read about in The UCWbL handbook, many of the skills tutors develop doing these activities can be used in other jobs as well. Scrawl, for instance, showcases radio-personnel skills and guest-and-topic management. The Breakroom employs skills of video-editing, camera management, and screenwriting. And, the projects team members create serve as fine evidence of their abilities if they’re looking to work in the film industry. The Research Team works with ongoing projects that focus on data management and analysis. While I can’t speak one-hundred percent from experience, I’m sure that the skills you develop working on these teams’ projects count in the long-run to make your resume stand out as unique and multifaceted.
Yet how might one be able to phrase their skills as a peer writing tutor? According to resume examples listed on Jobhero, resumes that are typically crafted based on writing center skills focus mainly on highlighting these qualities: creativity; coaching, teaching, interpersonal skills, and successfully motivating and encouraging students. Although each individual resume that we UCWbLers will craft for ourselves will look very different on a person-by-person basis, these skills may hopefully help generate ideas for my fellow tutors on how they might want to represent The UCWbL as part of their line of work.
Of course, resumes are only half of the battle; there are cover letters, interviews, and writing samples, depending on the job you apply for. Either way, as many of us move toward our careers and beyond, maybe we’ll find that The UCWbL has prepared us even more than we first believed.
Extra Resources:
https://www.thebalance.com/writing-and-editing-skills-list-2063778
https://uptowork.com/blog/what-skills-to-put-on-a-resume
http://www.jobhero.com/resume-samples/writing-tutor