🎞️ Organize Your Experiences

To increase your chances of passing the resume screening, you need to submit a resume tailored to the job description of the position you’re applying for.

That’s why, before diving into writing your resume, it’s helpful to organize your work or project experiences that you can later include in your resume. While this may take some time upfront, it will make it much faster to create resumes customized for each job description.

Here’s a 3-step process we recommend for organizing your experiences:

📒 1. Create an Experience Archive

If you don’t already have a system for keeping track of your work/project experiences, now is the time to set one up. As your career progresses and you take on more projects, it can be hard to remember specific achievements and details. Without an archive, you’ll end up guessing when it comes time to write your resume.

There are plenty of note/memo apps available, so pick one that works for you. Cloud-based options are especially useful since you can access your archive from anywhere.

We use Notion. It’s free, has tons of templates, and offers a lot of flexibility for organizing your notes. Plus, being cloud-based, you can access and edit your archive anytime, anywhere.

You don’t have to use a note app, just choose a system that’s easy to manage in the long run.

📝 2. Document All Work/Project Experiences

Once you’ve set up a place to store your experiences, begin by listing all of your work/project experiences everything you can remember. If you only record major experiences for your resume, you might find that you lack options when tailoring your resume to match various job descriptions.

Even experiences that seem minor could contain important keywords relevant to a job description, and leaving them out might cause your resume to be overlooked. If you have less than five years of experience, I recommend documenting every work or project experience you can think of.

Instead of writing in full paragraphs, we suggest using the work/project experience template below to structure your notes.

🔒 Work/Project Experience Template

By using this template, you’ll be able to:

1. Easily add your work experiences to your resume
2. Get ready for potential interview questions about those experiences

🔒 3. Categorize by Tier

The work/project experiences you document in step 2 will be useful for your resume, but since resumes need to be tailored to specific job descriptions and are usually limited to 1-2 pages, you can’t include everything.

To help decide which experiences to highlight, we recommend categorizing your experiences into 3 tiers. This way, when updating your resume, you can prioritize the higher-tier experiences first.