Limiting your skills, abilities, and experiences to one page can be an extremely daunting task. For many, there isn’t enough room on there for everything you’ve done. This is a good problem to have, but an obstacle, nonetheless. Let’s get one thing straight: extending your resume to that second page simply isn’t an option. It might be tempting to get a full extra page to show a company why you’re worthy of them taking a risk on you, but you’ll end up doing much more harm than good in the end. If you can’t catch an employers attention with just that one page, you’re doing something very wrong.
If you’re
having space issues, take some time to evaluate how crammed your internship resume has
gotten over the years. While it all may
seem important to you, it’s not all going to be relevant to every job you apply
for. Make up one master internship resume as long
as you’d like it to be (I strongly urge you to restrict this to a page an a
half). Then, as you apply for jobs,
change up your internship resume each time! If you’re
going for marketing, knock off that HR externship. If you’re going for non-profit, keep those
volunteer hours on there. Get rid of as
much as you can spare because trust me, you’re going to need it.
When you’ve filtered out the white
noise, find three topics on there that you think would be most appealing to the company you’re applying to. Now, take
the time to add bullet points describing in detail all the pertinent skills and
talents you acquired through each experience.
This will catch the employer’s eye when they’re sifting through internship resumes,
as well as cater the questions in every internship interview to your most familiar skills.