Functional Resume Layout - An Ideal Entry Level Resume

Why A Functional Resume Layout Is Suited For A Fresh Graduate

Perhaps one of the biggest achievements you can accomplish and be proud of is graduating from university or college. As a fresh graduate, you take pride in knowing that all your efforts in studying and enduring sleepless nights to finish off a project have eventually paid off. You are ready and prepared to face the corporate world and enter another chapter of your life as a working employee. You start looking for a job but suddenly become stumped. How are you going to get a job when most of the job openings require a certain degree of experience? And you have none.

As a fresh college graduate - a new engineer, teacher, nurse, accountant, information technologist, dentist, architect, etc. - you are best suited for entry-level jobs. At this stage, prospective employers generally expect that you have a college degree and that your major is relevant and in line with the type of job position you are seeking. They would expect you to have some general work experience acquired through part-time or summer jobs, volunteering works and the like. Prospective employers also generally like to know that you have character and work references, be it your teachers, professors and supervisors. Your references will help them in assessing your professional attitudes, work ethics and the skills that you have to offer.

So what is the best method to highlight all these accomplishments? This is where a functional resume layout is very well suited.

A functional resume layout is ideal for someone who is just fresh out of college. A functional resume layout puts more focus on your skills and qualifications rather than your professional work history, which as a recent college graduate, you have none. A functional resume layout highlights the competencies and skills you have rather than when you were employed and where you used and acquired these skills. So instead of seeing a list of employment records with job titles and duties, a functional resume layout will display sections with skills and competencies as headings. This could include skills in customer relations, customer service, people management, project management and so on.

In short, a functional resume layout is highly recommended for people just trying to enter into the workforce. In fact, a functional resume layout is the most common resume layout used by college students and graduates who want to apply for internship and want to land their first work experience after college.

How to Make a Functional Resume Layout

1. The first thing that you need to formulate when starting with a functional resume layout is your resume objective statement or career objective. Make sure that your career objective is personal and suited to the type of role that you are seeking. In fact, it is best to customize your career objective statement to fit in with the role that you are a currently seeking for a particular company. A functional resume layout for fresh graduates and first timers becomes more effective if your career objective statement clearly indicates how your education and skills can be utilized in the satisfactory performance of the role and how the position can help you develop more skills and experience.

2. Your educational background should come next in a functional resume layout. Write down the name of the university or college that you attended, its location, when you graduated and the major that you have undertaken. If you received honors and achievement awards, it is advisable to include them as this shows that you excel in what you do and would likely carry it on to your job performance. Trainings and seminars attended can also be included in a functional resume layout. This is especially applicable if the trainings and seminars that you have undertaken are relevant to the position that you are seeking.

3. The next step in structuring a functional resume layout is to write down your professional skills and competencies. This is what differentiates a functional resume layout from a chronological resume layout. So instead of listing down work experiences, make subheadings using your key skills and competencies that you want to highlight and are applicable to the role. Focus on skills that are relevant to the position. You can usually find this out in the job advertisement, as most employers tend to list skill requirements for a role.

So if you are good at customer relations and you are applying for a role that requires this competency, then use a functional resume layout to highlight this skill. Make a subheading "Customer Relations". Then proceed to enumerate tasks and duties you performed that support and validate this skill. Think of part-time and summer jobs you performed, community involvements, volunteer works, school clubs and activities you participated in. There are certainly a lot of skills you will have learned from them that you can apply to the role you want. Use these in a functional resume layout to get your job application noticed. For example, if you have editing skills learned from being the school editor of the school's publication then you can point this out especially if you are applying for a position in the publishing industry. A functional resume layout is very effective if done properly.

4. The last section of a functional resume layout is dedicated to listing your references. As a fresh graduate, it is advisable to include resume references with your job application especially if you have already been in contact with the prospective employer and they asked you to hand in a job application. This facilitates in the immediate processing of your job application rather than the employer having to contact you again to ask for references. A functional resume layout must include a section for references.

Now that we have discussed the basic structure of a functional resume layout and how to make one, the next thing that needs to be done is act on the information you just learned. If it still sounds vague and you need some functional resume layout samples that can guide you in making your own, then you can always search for it in the internet using the popular search engines like google and yahoo. We're pretty sure that you will be presented with a lot of useful samples of a functional resume layout that you can start out with.