With employment becoming more and more competitive each year with more job applicants and demanding job descriptions, you need to update your resume as far as new skills you have acquired and give it a new appearance. One particular skill that is becoming more in demand as online businesses continue to grow is knowing about web design-even if it’s just basic HTML and CSS skills.
One way to upgrade your resume and prove you know your way around web design is to create your own website as an interactive resume for human resource managers and employers to look at instead of the normal paper resume. Here is how you can get started:
Learning the Basics: HTML and CSS
HTML and CSS are the basic coding languages to web and graphic design which is why they are the first two things you should learn before building an interactive online resume. Even if you have not had any previous training in computer science, they are fairly easy to learn whether you take an additional class at your college or in the community or decide to watch online video tutorials and read about it in helpful textbooks. If you are still unsure of how to use HTML and CSS efficiently, ask a local business if you can shadow one of their web or graphic designers. They could be willing to meet with you outside of work hours to tutor you in different areas of web design as well.
What should your Interactive Resume Include?
Just like any other resume, you should include:
- Previous work experienceWhere
- When
- Job title and description
- Work skills
- Challenges
- Education
- A bit about yourself
- A reference list of past employers
You don’t have to worry about whether or not your interactive resume is amazing, by displaying the skills that you know how to use the website builder of 1and1, just that alone tells future employers a lot about your skills already.
Put those Web Design Skills to Work!
Your interactive website shouldn’t include just text (hence the term interactive, hint hint) so try to include different elements such as a video of you explaining who you are, what you have done in the past for other employers, or what you hope to be doing in the future such as your dream career. If you have learned other skills such as Photoshop, create a link that takes a visitor to that part of your portfolio so that they are able to view your images.
If you are a skilled writer or helped with a project such as an online marketing campaign, include an archive to take visitors to read what you have written and see what you have accomplished.
Again, nothing too fancy. You don’t have to create an interactive online resume in one day. Even just basic images such as graphs to explain where your skills are at from “still growing/improving” to “awesome.” It displays to future employers what different strengths you excel at and in what areas you want to grow.
The point of sharing your web design skills with an interactive online resume is that you don’t use any templates, just like you shouldn’t use a Microsoft Word template to create a standard resume. There are a couple of different platforms to help you get started or to better help you understand how web design works, but if you can, work from scratch.
More and more job recruiters are asking that applicants send their resumes and cover letters electronically. With that kind of demand, you really have no excuse not to include your online resume in an introduction email or cover letter.