If you dread updating your resume, you’re not alone. Over 30 percent of people surveyed* consider writing or updating their resume their least favorite part of the job search. Our career expert sponsor Maxie McCoy joined us to share top tips and tools for creating a resume that expertly combines your professional know-how with the design flair that will get you noticed.
Nail your cover letter
A stellar resume starts with a strong cover letter. The key? Showing how your talent and experience will solve a problem or drive results for your future employer. For example, if you say you’re collaborative, discuss how you used that skill at your last internship, and then connect it to what you aim to accomplish for the new company. Never underestimate your worth; Maxie tells us, “Even if you’re new to the industry, it’s all in the language you use to describe what you’ve done. If you speak to the value you provided rather than the expertise you have, you’ll navigate this nicely.”
Know your audience
If you’re going for an accounting job at a big firm, keep it simple and classy, not flashy. For an ad agency position, take a creative plunge with design and format. Speaking the company’s language is important too. Look at the company website and job postings, speak with current employees and mirror that tone and voice in your resume.“ If you’re unsure of who will be looking at your resume,” Maxie says, “it’s best to err on the side of simplicity and elegance.”
Write a resume you would read
Remember, recruiters are human—and they can see right through the fluff. Avoid sounding stuffy or using resume jargon like “team player” or “hard worker.” Make summaries short and your experience descriptions results-driven and to the point.
Name drop
“Name and company dropping in your resume is often a good thing; it gives your interviewer a frame of reference,” says Maxie. Who have you worked with, assisted, learned from? Think partnerships, clients, projects, etc. It all helps.
Show your value with data
According to Maxie, “Candidates often don’t show enough with numbers, statistics and quantitative descriptions of their work.” So use data and specifics to make your past responsibilities and projects more tangible for the recruiter. For example, rather than saying you managed the university newspaper, explain that you led an editorial staff of 20 at the university newspaper, which reaches a student body of over 350,000.
Do something, anything, to stand out
“Employers are looking for wildly passionate people. And passionate people do crazy things, like go the extra mile,” says Maxie. A professional resume is important, but in today’s job market, it’s often not enough on its own. Supplement your resume with a digital portfolio; pen a blog post about your passion for the industry, trends you’re seeing or a past project you’ve learned from. Or, create a brief video that shows off your communication skills and passion for the company you’re applying for. “Whatever you’re doing must come full circle and point other directions, telling a clear story of yourself,” Maxie notes. “People need to be able to show who they are online as much as in person.”
Use the right tools
Writing your resume, creating a portfolio or writing a blog post is tough enough, but formatting or coding it can be even harder. Maxie’s recommendation? “Don’t reinvent the wheel—use templates and tools that make it easy.”
To help, we’ve tapped the design expertise of digital print and design company MOO to create all-new resume and cover letter templates in Microsoft Word.** One in four people we surveyed think having a “plain resume” could hinder their job search, and we think these customizable templates will strike just the right balance to get noticed.
We also created online resume, portfolio and blog post templates in our digital storytelling app, Sway. The free app makes it easy to create a digital representation of your work even if you don’t have professional design or coding skills. Once you’re finished, you can easily share it with a link. Pro tip: Sway has high-resolution images from sources like PickIt, Flicker and Bing right within the app. Just click the Insert tab to start browsing.
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Excel 2016 Quick Start Guide
New to Excel 2016 or upgrading from a previous version? Use this guide to learn the basics! Helpful tips and tricks including:
1. Creating workbooks
2. Finding files
3. Discovering contextual tools
4. Inserting functions and building formulas
5. Sharing your workbooks
How to AutoFit Cell Width and Height to Cell Data in Excel
Many times, our text doesn’t fit perfectly in Excel cells. To adjust the size without having to drag and find the ideal fit, a double-click can take care of it for you. With a quick click, you can AutoFit your cells so that your text fits comfortably within your spreadsheet, and doesn’t trail off into the next cell.
See the video demonstration above and steps below.
•In your spreadsheet, find the cells where the text doesn’t fit.
•Say for instance your text in cell C3 is cut off by the text in D3.
•Go to the column title bar. •Hover over the space between columns C and D.
•There is a thin grey line between the columns.
•A new icon should appear.
•While the icon is present, double click and your column will AutoFit the text in column C. It will jump and readjust.
To AutoFit your text in row, follow these same steps.
Sick of Calibri? You don’t have to stick with Office 365’s standard set of fonts in your documents or messages. It’s a snap to change the font of an individual email message or even the default font for all new email messages you create.
In individual messages, simply highlight the text you wish to change, and select a new font style from the menu.
To change the default font in Outlook 2013/2016:
•From the File tab, select Options.
•Select Mail.
•Click Stationery and Fonts.
•Make your desired changes to new mail messages, replying or forwarding messages, and/or composing and reading plain text messages.
•Click OK until you return to your mailbox.
To change the default font in Outlook on the Web:
•From your gear menu, select Options.
•Click Message format under the Layout menu.
•Make your desired changes in the Message font window.
•Click Save.
One of the benefits of using an application like Word is that you can add more than just words to your document–you aren’t constrained by what you can type. In addition to inserting things like images and shapes, you can insert symbols and special characters into your document.
To insert a symbol:
•From the Insert tab, click Symbol.
•Choose the symbol that you want from the drop-down list. If the symbol is not in the list, click More Symbols. In the font box, choose the font you are using, click the symbol you want to insert, and select Insert.
To insert a special character:
•From the Insert tab, click Symbol.
•Click More Symbols.
•Select the Special Characters tab.
•Choose the character you want to insert, and select Insert.
Managed Solution’s In The TechKnow is a Web Tech Series featuring how-to video tutorials on technology.
This series is presented by Jennell Mott, Business Operations Manager, and provides a resource for quick technical tips and fixes. You don’t need to be a technical guru to brush up on tech tips!
Don’t see the technology that you would like to learn? Submit a suggestion to inthetechknow@managedsolution.com and we will be sure to cover it in our upcoming webcast series.
Start menu is unarguably one of the greatest and oldest trademarks of Windows. Microsoft tried to get rid of it in Windows 8, but had to bring it back after strong opposition from users. Now with Windows 10 company has innovated once again to make this oldie-goldy useful and important. And it worth be mentioned that company’s efforts haven’t gone waste. Start menu in Windows 10 is much more useful and customizable than it has ever been. Let’s try some easy customization tricks that can help us in tweaking the Start menu according to our own preferences:
1. Resizing the Menu
If you’re unhappy with your current Start menu size and wish it would’ve been a bit bigger (or perhaps smaller, depending on your taste) then you can simply resize it by holding your mouse pointer on the top edge of the menu and dragging it up or down. If you resize down, it’ll make the menu wider; if you resize up, it’ll shrink the width of the menu.
2. Live Tiles Customization Options
As you know already, Windows 10 Start menu has got live tiles. And thankfully, Microsoft has provided a ton of ways to customize them. For example:
You can resize your tiles – just right-click it, hold your mouse pointer on the “Resize” option and then choose a size from the menu that’ll appear next to this option.
If you wish, you can also turn off live updates for any of your tiles. Just right-click the tile and select “Turn live tile off” option.
Finally, you can also pin or unpin tiles. Just right-click the tile and select “Pin to Start” or “Unpin from Start” option depending on what you want to do. If a tile that you want to pin is currently not displaying on the menu, then you can find it from All Apps view and then pin it from there. The same is true for items on the left hand side of the menu!
Give a different color to your Start menu: Blue is the trademark color that Microsoft has been using proudly in most versions of Windows since the very beginning, but if you wish you can give the color of your choice to your Start menu. Just right-click on any empty space in the menu and select “Personalize.” This will bring a “Color and Appearance” dialog box before you from where you can select any awesome or awful color scheme that you like.
Get Rid of Tiles Completely : Finally, if you don’t want those Live Tiles and want to get back to a Windows 7 styled simple Start menu then you can get that thing too! Just unpin all the items and resize down the menu until it looks classic!
There may be even more ways of customizing the Start menu in the final release of Windows 10. These’re just a few quick-tricks that we tried on our Technical Preview. If we find any new ones, we’ll definitely let you know about them, so keep visiting us regularly!
Managed Solution’s In The TechKnow is a Web Tech Series featuring how-to video tutorials on technology.
This series is presented by Jennell Mott, Business Operations Manager, and provides a resource for quick technical tips and fixes. You don’t need to be a technical guru to brush up on tech tips!
Don’t see the technology that you would like to learn? Submit a suggestion to inthetechknow@managedsolution.com and we will be sure to cover it in our upcoming webcast series.
