New resume, portfolio builders help students highlight their skills

The Career Services Center just adopted a new resume builder to help students get their qualifications down on paper – or online – more quickly.

And a new e-portfolio allows students to highlight their accomplishments, particularly their leadership skills, through photography, video and audio clips.

The new program, Optimal Resume, is free to students and allows them to easily format and change their resumes and to maintain different versions, both in paper and on the Web.

And the online portfolios are an important tool for students to recognize and promote their leadership abilities, says Joanne DeMark, WWU’s leadership development specialist.

Leadership e-portfolios not only demonstrate to potential employers and graduate schools that the student has leadership experience, but just putting the portfolios together helps students recognize and understand those skills, says DeMark, who directs WWU’s Leadership Advantage.

Several WWU students have already tried out the leadership e-portfolios. See examples here. The new tools allow students to focus on the content of their resumes and get them done more quickly, says Susan Anderson, a career counselor at the center.

“The idea is, we want to get students focused on the important part,” Anderson says, “which is talking to the person who will give them a job or internship.”