Today was my interview with the workshop instructor from Downriver Community Conference Work First program. I participated in a three day workshop called, “Personal Placement Network” (PPN), a program designed to provide professionals in career transitions with proven, self-directed job search techniques and I made an appointment to have the instructor take a closer look at my resume.

He was very helpful. He was able to determine that my resume was in need of a more comprehensive career summary, as opposed to the current opening entitled, “objective” He helped me tease out which career skill-sets I needed to extract, and which information I could lose, altogether. He said professionals have very little time to view resumes and they ought to be as concise as possible. He also stated that although the hard copy needed to be concise, a lengthy electronic copy would be okay, because most professionals are accustomed to scrolling through information on a PC. He helped me devise another career summary that included more detail about my experience as a scholar, and I realized I was able to do this because of the continuous amount of questions he asked me. His inquiry developed even more self-assessment on my part, and I was able to tweak the already ample amounts of skills related to writing that I had listed. As he and I looked over the details of my resume, together we also located a few mechanical issues that required addressing. We basically proofread an outdated version of my CV, and systematically recreated a polished version. We were a part of the writing process, just as tutor and consultant are. He was a peer-reviewer and I gained the benefit of it.

As I sat there, I realized what we had been doing was the very idea that I argue mainstream classes need to incorporate, more. We worked together to make adjustments and changes to text, and the conversation encouraged metacognitive strategies that I used to improve and revisit the text. My resume writing interview was an example of the writing process at work, and how peer-review enables success in that process. I had to giggle after thinking about it. What took me so long to recognize this? I mean, after all, a resume is just another genre, right?