161: The Résumé That Gets You Hired in L&D

The EdUp L&D Podcast (00:00.706)
you

The EdUp L&D Podcast (00:05.356)
Welcome to regular iSpring Webinar series, where we discuss Elon chance, share tips and tricks and have our client success stories. And while we are waiting for more participants to join, let's get to know each other a bit. So I'm curious to know where everyone's located. So if you can write in the chat, what state, country or city you're joining us from, it would be great. Okay. Hello from Maine, Wilmington.

Okay. Washington, Mexico. Okay. Great. Great. So many. Yes. States so many and countries. see Switzerland. Great. Okay. So welcome everyone. my name is Kate. I'm a community manager at iSpring and your moderator for today's And today's webinar is called the instructional design resume that gets you hired.

And now let me introduce you to our valuable cast, Holly Owens. Holly is a seasoned educator, instructional technologist and podcast host committed to designing impactful learning experiences. She has over 18 years of experience in education in various roles. And today she will share this experience with you guys. So please welcome Hallie. Hi Hallie, how are you doing today?

Hi, hi everyone. I'm doing well. Okay. It's great to see you and everybody. Yeah, great. I'm so excited. Can't wait to get started. But before we start, I also want to invite you all to join our LinkedIn group, iSpring Learning Exchange. There you'll find a lot of helpful and inspiring content about e-learning and of course, a community of like-minded professionals. I'm passing the mic over to you, Holly Okay. Great.

Hi everyone, I'm so excited to be here. I'm gonna share my presentation momentarily. I just wanna say that this is going to be something that is live and it is for you. It is for you to take away what you need to when it comes to your resume. And remember, the resume is just one piece of the puzzle here. It's not the whole shebang and things that you have to do. It's not just one thing in order to get you hired.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (02:22.862)
I wanted to do this presentation with iSpring to set you on the right path and then also set us up for the upcoming workshop that's happening in July, the Live2Day, along with some asynchronous activities, which I'll be talking throughout this presentation about. So let's get started. First question, though, I want to ask you is, what is your current role? So if you're an instructional designer, if you're an educator, so if you want to type in the chat and tell me what your current role is.

I would love to see and get some data from that. Great. have library specialist, Danielle, content specialist, studying to be an instructional designer, doing an ID fellowship, nonprofit teacher. Yes, Stephanie, that counts. That definitely counts. Special educator. Okay. We have a lot of different roles that are coming in or tuning into this webinar. So I think that's great.

I'm going to speak to some things that may help you as you are thinking about transitioning into a role in instructional design or learning and development. Can everybody see my screen okay? Please let me know I'm using a presenter view. Great. So here we are. Welcome to the ID resume that gets you hired. And I really want to say that gets you traction, not necessarily hired because there's no guarantees.

in this job market, but this is something that is going to set you on the right path. And as I was setting up this particular presentation, I learned a lot of different things too that I want to share with you. So first and foremost, one of the things is that L &D in this space is growing and continuing to grow. The projections are that by 2029, which believe it or not is only four years away, so less than five years.

This field is expected to grow by 6 % in the education and government space. And then it's expected to grow as far as training and development specialists. So this could be incorporated, this can be a nonprofit. It's expected to grow by 9%. So the typical, if you want to have a frame of reference as to what that is, typically jobs.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (04:41.644)
grow from three to 5 % every five to 10 years. So it's above average as far as the projections are concerned for this industry. So if you're looking to get into an industry, it's a good time to jump into instructional design or L &D now. I'll spend a brief moment just talking to you. I see some familiar faces, but I also see some familiar, not so familiar names. So I want to introduce myself and tell you a little bit about

my journey into L &D. So I started out my career as a high school government teacher and then I transitioned over into e-learning development as a government contractor. I just got tired of teaching. You can listen to my whole story out on my podcast, EdUp L &D. I share everything there. I'm not going to bore you with the details today.

Also, as I left the classroom, I began teaching as an adjunct in higher education. So I still teach at Toro University in New York. I teach instructional design courses. I know shocker. And I've been doing that at Toro for eight years, but I've been teaching as an adjunct since 2012. In conjunction with that, I've taught at and I've worked at various higher education institutions where I spent the majority of my career working as an instructional technologist,

instructional designer, assistant director of online learning in a variety of different settings. So I spent the better part of my career there. And then in 2021, I transitioned over into, was it 2021 or 2022? I can't get the day, Over to corporate instructional design and I started working at Amazon Pharmacy. So I've got all this education experience, I have the corporate experience. And then most recently, my most recent role, which is not

necessarily directly tied to instructional design, but it has a lot of ID components. I will say that is I'm the director of growth marketing at an ed tech company called Yellowdig. So I've my path has been it's been about 20 years that I've been in this space and I'm so grateful for the opportunities that I've had and I definitely wanted to come and share my story, but also share my tips and tricks things to do things not to do.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (07:00.587)
specifically when it comes to your resume. So just a quick note about going from classroom to corporate and thinking about reframing the experience for you. So one of the things I want to say is that I've worked with a variety of different clients, variety of different people who have thought about making this transition and have made this transition. So when you're thinking about, you know, what you're going to be transitioning into, how do your skills

transfer over here. So one of the things I want to tell you is that you as if you are an educator, if you're an instructional designer, if you're working in that realm of education, you do have transferable skills. So curriculum becomes program design. And I did a whole LinkedIn live that was sponsored by iSpring that I just dropped as a podcast episode that tells you the different roles you can go into beyond instructional design. So I encourage you to check that out as well.

Yes, you will be getting the slides, Marcia. I will share those. At the end, I will give you access to these. If you're the type of person, you're currently an educator and you're integrating technology into the classroom or you're the person that everybody is like, help me use this smart board, help me use this printing board or this tech tool. That translates into LMS management, administration, the skills there.

And one of the things I want to say, you have to have the mindset, you have the skills. Like I've worked with so many different educators coming out of the classroom who have not honored their teaching experience. They've worked with people, maybe resume reviewers or recruiters who don't have the same background as them or who don't have an insider perspective into our industry. And they have told them to erase.

their teaching experience, which is not something I recommend doing. So we're going to talk about that teaching experience today and how that needs to be presented on your resume. I think it's so important to honor that experience. So please don't erase that. That is a part of who you are. That is a part of your professional journey. That's a part of your personal journey. And also too, that counts. So when you're looking for different roles, if you say you want to go into

The EdUp L&D Podcast (09:18.027)
Let's say we're going to talk about instructional design a lot. You want to go into instructional design. If you have five to seven years of teaching experience, you're looking for mid-level roles. You're not going back down to the entry-level roles. Or you're looking for contract experience. If you have 20-plus years in education and you're stepping out, you're looking for senior roles in this space. Now, you may have to maybe do a mid to senior role, like that's kind of in the middle. But I discourage thinking that you're starting over again.

You're starting over in the sense that you're in a new industry and you have to learn some new skills or how your skills are transferable. But you're not starting at the beginning. You've already started your career journey. All right.

One of the things I like to tell people to do is this three step process in trying to figure out where you want to be, what you want to do. So it's called Reflect Plan Act. But I really want you to take a few moments right now as I'm talking to think about evaluating your values, your skills, your strengths, your passions and understanding what really drives you.

Where does that intrinsic motivation come from? What is the intrinsic motivation for you changing roles? Maybe it's more pay, maybe it's the freedom to spend more time with your family. So really taking some time to self-reflect before you start jumping into applying for roles or even start jumping into making over your resume or making over your portfolio or developing some of those professional materials.

Then where do you wanna go? Where do you wanna be? All too often people try to jump into this industry and they're like, I wanna be an instructional designer. I wanna be an LXD. I wanna be an LMS administrator. Well, where do you wanna work? What sector of this do you wanna work with? You're not just gonna put applications in every single sector because some of them see instructional design differently.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (11:23.435)
Some of the roles are remote, some of the roles are hybrid, so you really have to figure out like where you want to be. Where's the vision for you? Where do you want to end up? You know, your first job might be a bridge job out of the classroom, so you have to consider that, but you need to have a plan. You need to figure out like where you want to be. And then an action plan, like mapping out actually where you to go. What are the steps developing your own strategic plan for your

excuse me, for yourself, like your career goals. And those may align with some of your personal goals. Like I love doing my podcast that aligns a lot with what I do professionally, networking and job searching strategies. There's a lot of noise out there, folks. There's a lot of noise on LinkedIn right now. So I'm really glad that iSpring is taking the time to kind of simplify things for you. And I'm able to support that and what they're doing as you're going into

into the job search. So just make sure that you you're taking and evaluating the noise that's out there and it's from people you trust or people who's been through this experience. So take that into consideration as people are sharing advice to. So here we go. Reflect. Plan. Reflect. Where do you want to go and then plan that. And none of this is going to happen overnight. So it's really when people say it's a marathon it's not a sprint.

There are anomalies out there where people get a job immediately, but they're lucky. I can just say there's a lot of luck involved in that. But this is going to take some time for you. So be prepared for a little bit of a ride.

All right, what do people really want? What are the recruiters and the HR people reading first when it comes to your resume? I would say they're looking at that top third of it. So like name, maybe have a professional summary up there and you have some experience listed up there. So one of the things that I just recently read about is people who are the recruiters or the people that are reading your resume beyond it going through the ATS system.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (13:37.045)
six to eight seconds. How are you going to impress someone? And that's the average attention span, just so you know. How are you going to impress someone in six to eight seconds? What is that going to look like? So I'm going to share some ideas that I have here with you and also how to kind of humanize the resume a little bit. It's a very, very static document. So they're looking for any keywords that also match the job description that you have in your experience. And then the format of it.

Look, I understand there's a ton of different AI out there and I understand there's like, you know, different ways you can present your resume, but you don't want to like have it be this whole theatrical spectacle of expectations and different things that you've done. You want it to be a simple format. So is it readable? Is it something that people can actually understand? Is there a flow to it? You don't want to overdo it.

I think all too often people feel like that the resume has to be like this, it's grander thing. If there's a lot of text, there's a lot of styling. These get overlooked more often than not, even if you're qualified. And just remember the people that are reviewing your resume, people that are on the team. And I can attest to this from being on different committees and different hiring situations that we're just glancing at it. We're looking to see, like I'm looking for keywords as I'm...

Do you have experience in project management? Do you have experience working on a team? Are you collaborative? That sort of stuff. I'm looking for that. And I'm not going typically past the first page unless I need to see if there's any other relevant experience. Maybe you've done some higher education teaching or you've done some training on the side. So just remember, this is a quick read for people who the recruiters and the HR people that are reviewing your resume.

We'll get to the ATS stuff in a minute. I know that's a big question for people on how to navigate those challenges. I'm loving the conversations happening in the chat. I have four years experience, Kimberly said, creating e-learning courses with some different tools. They show me how many is not taking any of that work that I've created in past due to the proprietary, so now I have to create new items. I would say that you can take some of that work and just remove.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (16:00.171)
You know, the stuff that's identifiable and even just put it into a gen AI and tell it to give you an outline or have it outline some slides for you so that you can recreate it fairly quickly. I understand that there's stuff that proprietary, but I've taken some stuff that I've done and I've just removed the identifiable information. Not sure if that's it's possible for you, but I do understand that challenge.

All right, so why are you getting ghosted? We typically associate the term ghosting with dating apps. But why are getting ghosted? What's happening out there? there's this misalignment between your resume and the job description. Like you're just spraying and you're praying that something, you're doing a lot of LinkedIn easy applies. And one of the things Maria's saying right now is please go to the community to share these. Like there's a community of people out there, I'm gonna take a quick drink.

who are at different levels, different places, experience these things. So your resume needs to clearly demonstrate your experience. I've seen resumes also too when we talk about readability and formatting. It's so tiny. It's so tiny. I work last. I can't read it. A lot of people, it's just, it's so tiny. So you definitely want it to be readable. And if you have that sort of disconnect with your experiences and aligning with the role, you're gonna be spit out. You're gonna be put

through the ATS system, you're not gonna be, or you're gonna be reviewed by a human, they're gonna be like, I don't understand what's happening here. So you really need to shift the mindset to kind of telling your story, your unique approach to solving different problems. It's definitely gonna help you increase your chances of being seen as like a potential person, a potential candidate for the role.

All right, let's talk about that nasty ATS system. I've never been a fan of this, but I understand the premise behind it. I want to give you some data first to kind of show what's happening out in the workspace. So Fortune 500 companies, 99 % of them use ATS. So if you're applying to a big Fortune 500 company, you're probably more so than not going through an ATS system.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (18:19.371)
So please know that that is going to be happening for you if you're applying to these bigger companies and Microsoft's, Amazon's of the world. They're going to be, you're going through ATS. Larger companies that are not necessarily Fortune 500, about 45 % of them use an ATS system and then it gets a little smaller as you go into the small to midsize. Maybe about 25 % of the small to midsize use them. So,

If you're in the industry and you're looking at a larger company or Fortune 5 Hardware, I'm going to say more, you're going to be going through an ATS system. If it's a smaller company, if it's startup, maybe it'll happen, but more than likely there's going to be a human reviewing that. So just keep this in mind as you're applying that. We all know when you apply for a role and then 30 minutes later, you get an email or less, that's an ATS system. Some ed tech companies use ATS.

ATS systems, yes, depending upon their size, small, medium, large. Again, they can fit into these different categories I have listed here. So, you know, it really does depend. I will say from working at Yellowding and some other like OPM companies, we did not use ATS systems. We did human reviews. We did committee reviews. I like that, Caitlin, tell it to extract all ATS keywords.

I don't think it's a waste of time, but I feel like AI is something that still needs to be evaluated because this putting together your resume is very human. It's talking about yourself. And while a gen AI can kind of learn who you are, you are the person who knows you best. So I'd say, know, proceed with caution there. Again, it feels like a game, you know, with with with ATS systems.

I really feel like they just like some people get spit out here are completely qualified or overqualified for the positions that they are, you know, applying for. It's really it's really doing a disservice to people sometimes that this kind of thing happens and they make the companies themselves. I'll say this is the companies that are listening or people who are re listening to this recording. You know, just doing.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (20:40.735)
Just having that ATS system really does like it helps you in the sense that if you get thousands and thousands of applications, which a lot of these roles are, but you might be missing out on the person who you think might be the unicorn to companies. So I kind of recommend a dual action here, having an ATS system or maybe some knockout questions.

that's a, I'm seeing a lot of questions come in. So I'm gonna try to get through some of this content and then respond to those before we go into the live stuff. So again, it's a big game. Different ATSs have different things. And I wanna say that one of the tips is use that simple clean format. I've already mentioned this. So making sure that you have a clean format for your resume. It's not the fancy like things are moving on the screen. I understand like,

Canva has some great templates. There's some great templates out there that might be used if you are applying for certain positions like graphic design or other things. When instructional design, we want to keep it very simple so that it can go through the system and actually get you to a human that is reviewing it. So make sure you're keeping it clean. Small tweaks equal big impact. I'm not a fan of like.

tweaking it every single time for every single role, but small tweaks can definitely help, especially when you've gone and had some more experience and you definitely need to update your skills or the technologies you've interacted, tweaking your headline a little bit, tweaking about who you are, especially if you're looking for a role, say in the management position, you might want to say you've been a senior instructional designer and you have supervisor.

You supervise different teams or a group of teams or just one team or seven people, something like that, and revise your top bullet points. thinking about the sections to emphasize your achievements and, you know, the responsibilities come secondary to what we're going to read as far as achievements are concerned. And those bullet points that you include in your resume that show what you've done. I know it's very difficult, especially for teachers to think about, like,

The EdUp L&D Podcast (22:52.773)
talking just about yourself and what you've accomplished, but that's what companies want to see. That's what industry wants to see, especially if you're going, deciding to go into the corporate space. Education appreciates that too. Label things clearly, where's your summary, where are the sections, what's your relevant experience, what skills do you have, what technology skills do you have? Can overtailing it come off as too perfect? Yeah.

It can, I mean, this is not, this is not something where perfection wins. This is something where you're, you're putting in your experience and you're being very honest and transparent about, you know, what you've done and your achievements. And I mean, being a perfectionist isn't going to win here, with your resume. They're really, the companies are looking for the unicorn and the unicorn doesn't exist. But if you can massage it and modify in a way with your experience that you can fit the role. And I always say this, if you.

have 60, and I want to know in the chat too, if you have 60 to 70 % of the qualifications, you should apply for the role. So how many people, if you want to end the chat, can tell me that have you stopped applying for a role because you didn't feel you were qualified, but you had a lot of the experience? Tell me, yes or no. Or put a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Oh, goodness.

Okay, so I'm seeing a lot of people, yes, you're like, know, that imposter syndrome is kind of sneaking in a little bit. So I would say 60 % 70 % apply anyway, apply anyway. Here's what I'm talking about, like ATS systems, they don't want to see like visuals, they don't want to see like things moving on the screen, keep it text-based. You can have links to things, that's totally fine.

Okay, only 75 of the skills isn't up for me. If you have your own little thing, that's totally fine too. So visuals can really, it can break your resume and like it can get so chaotic and it's just very busy. Again, choose the right format. So along with that clarity and that clear design, submit as a Word doc or a PDF so that it has that compatibility with the ATS system. I will say that

The EdUp L&D Podcast (25:17.829)
It's not just one thing to get past ATS and sometimes it's difficult depending on what level of screening that they're using. So just be cognizant of that, that you can follow up if you got spit out. And then I would encourage people definitely if you get spit out to follow up with the person, the recruiter to follow up with the hiring manager to say, I'm not sure that this was supposed to happen. I recommend that. So follow up and be like, can you do like a re-review?

Again, this is just reiterating what I've already been talking about using functional titles like things that align with what you're applying for L &D consultant, instructional designer, curriculum developer. Yeah, don't include your picture. Yeah, I think that was like a thing that was like a fad for a little while. And I know that Canva came out with all these great resume templates, but I feel like as ATS started growing in popularity, then it was like,

You have to do some research Ella. Out on LinkedIn World if you go to the job, the page, the company's page and you see people, you can see who's associated with that. So I would definitely, yeah, so pictures are common in Europe and Asia. So, you know, I'm speaking, a lot of my research is done domestically, so within the United States, so I just want to clarify that. So if you're applying for US roles, this is what's going to happen. I need to do a world debut, of course.

All right. Are you ready? We have come to the time to do the live edits. Before I jump into that, I want to look, there's about seven questions I want to answer before we jump into the live edits. And then we're going to do live edits for about 15 minutes. So if you don't have your resume handy right now, get it handy. Whether that's from Google Drive, whether that's a PDF document, somewhere you need to get it somewhere editable.

So you can start making some changes or making some comments for yourself. So Jill asks, would you recommend applying even if I'm not completed in my ID program? Yes, absolutely 100%. Especially if you're at the tail end of that program or, you know, companies want to see that you're interested in the profession and you being a part of our program will definitely tell them that you're interested in what they're doing and.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (27:42.967)
If it's not a requirement, because in corporate, honestly, I'll tell you, the team that I had on Amazon, 50 % of us were former educators. we had everybody that from somebody had a high school diploma all the way up to just masters, had master's degree. So it was a variety. So those things are weighted differently if depending upon what sector you're deciding to go into.

All right. What are the top tech skills you recommend? That's a loaded question because as an instructional designer in corporate and education, they're seen a little bit differently. For example, in the education sector, if you're becoming like an instructional designer or technologist, we're going to have to know the LMS. But the LMS in the education space that's used is different than the LMS that's used in the corporate space. So corporate does SCORM.

LMSs in the education space are very much like you create them and the edits are immediately live. It's the place where students log in. It's usually tied to an SIS system. So you're going to have to know some different things. And it depends on what tech skills you're talking about. You're talking about the technologies like understanding iSpring, how to do e-learning authoring that's mostly corporate. So.

I think that is a question that would have to be answered in a more lengthy conversation depending upon where you're going.

Okay, so Rachel's trying to move from HR coordinator into instructional designer, struggling with the lack of experience. It doesn't mean much for entry level early career opportunities. How can I pull out applicable HR activities to applied ID? the training aspect of HR is a big one and the project management as well. Also working collaboratively with people and onboarding.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (29:32.165)
Instructional designers often work in a space where they are responsible for creating onboarding experiences. So if you're in HR, that's a big transferable skill into instructional design. And we can definitely talk about that more offline, Rachel, if you have some other questions about those transferable skills. Most work is collaborative. How do you recommend framing achievements that are attributed to many people? I would say using statistical information.

Like what did it achieve? For example, on my team on Amazon Pharmacy, we redid a whole bunch of onboarding trainings for customer care agents. We turned them into simulations. And the time to proficiency to get those people out live, quote unquote, on the floor, they were virtual, was decreased by 50%. So we had, we could hire more people. We can get them out there faster. So I would say from a team perspective, you can say what happened overall based off of the collaborative project.

What were the OKRs or the KPIs that you achieved together as a team? That's a great question.

All right, let's go through a few more and then we're going to jump into the resume stuff. When can you address where the recruiters are, where the folks are tailoring the resumes and whether they like this? They know you're tailoring your resume. If they've been a recruiter for a long time, they tell you to tailor your resume. So it depends on the recruiter if they like it or not. And they're going to tell you like what they like or didn't like. If you have a conversation just with somebody, even if you're not working with a recruiter necessarily, they get a job.

or somebody out in LinkedIn world and just talk to a recruiter in the L &D space, you can ask them this particular question, but I would say they're asking you to tailor it and there's a reason they're looking at your resume. And if they're having a conversation with you, then you probably tailored it correctly.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (31:19.895)
All right. Where would Sarah said where would four years special education teaching and 10 years early how childhood put me entry mid or otherwise mid to senior. I'd say mid to senior that's 14 years experience and accessibility. If we're talking you have special education experience is something that is severely lacking. There's a lack of proactivity in the corporate space and a lot in the higher education space as well. So you can definitely use that to your advantage that you know a lot about.

accessibility things from doing IEPs, 504 is just working with special education students. So I would say that will put you in the mid to senior range. All right. I think I've answered all the questions. All right. You ready to things live? Guess what? I'm going to share my resume too. All right. The first thing, let me get this up.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (32:16.101)
This is the fun part.

All let me. All right. Can everybody see my resume?

The EdUp L&D Podcast (32:27.941)
All right, so the first thing I want you to do, especially if you haven't in a Google Doc or if you haven't in like Microsoft OneDrive or any of, make it bigger. Yeah, I'll make it bigger.

How's that?

The EdUp L&D Podcast (32:44.773)
All right. Excellent. So what I want you to the first thing I want you to do is if especially if you're in like a drive situation or you're one driver in any of the cloud storage is I want you to go and make a copy because I don't want you to mess if you have something that's original. And I typically just put my name and I put resume and then I underscore and I put the month. So I know when I last edited, edited this resume. So June 20, 25.

copy. All right. So I'm now going to my copy. So I had my June 2025 resume. I'll make this bigger. All right. So and looking at my own resume and if I was putting this into like to apply for a job, I would say the following things. I had clear labels. You know, I have my name. I have my information up there.

I have my areas of expertise, my tech proficiency, and my first career experience. one of the things that I think that is, so take a look at your top, let's start with your name. Take a look at your top part of your resume. Does it say who you are? Your name and at the back end of that, I have my degree information. So I have a dual master's degree in instructional technology and distance education. So I have that master's in education.

I have my email, which is LinkedIn. I would recommend for some people, if you have an email that is something that is like, it's like googly gock at the end, it's got 50 different numbers or 50 different letters, or it's not like a Holly.owens, I've just had this email forever and this is what I use. I recommend just making something that is, I've, tons of people have done this in the past, that you're just using for applying to jobs. That way that helps you better track things.

but also too it looks a little bit better on your resume. I have a link to my LinkedIn, which I highly recommend doing. I have a link to my portfolio, which is constantly being updated. Like I said, it's not just one thing. So you want these things right off the bat because you know what's gonna happen is when the reviewer or the HR person goes in is they're gonna click on these links and they're gonna go out and they're gonna LinkedIn stalk you or they're gonna go out and review your portfolio before they even come back and take a look at your resume.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (35:09.091)
because this gives them in no phone number and city and town. That might be something international, but in the United States, take out your address, take out your city, take that all out. That is no longer acceptable. You just need your name, where to contact you, LinkedIn and portfolio. If you want to add your phone number, I mean, you could, but that is something that's a part of the resume. So that's behind like a...

That's behind like a wall. Maybe you have to log in to create an account. So I would save that for when you're applying. But this is what they need to know. You can even go as far as just. Yeah I heard that you can add the location where you want to work from like remote. Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. Absolutely.

Yep. Yep. So I would say that if you are if you if you're applying to things like hybrid, you can list the city and state as well. I think that's also something to like when you put your address into the application and you put in what city and state also. But if you feel that that's appropriate for the so the first look at the resume, I would you can definitely put that in there. But I don't because I'm I'm I'm all remote. The next thing I would say is your headline. So.

Right now I feel like if you have a headline and by your headline I mean like titles that you've held or titles that your experience shows that you've held, I feel like mine's a little bit chaotic. I feel like there's a lot here. If I'm looking for a role that's just strictly an L &D, I would probably take out.

the other stuff that doesn't relate to that. And I can say L and D manager, you know, cause I have done some management things. So this is, this would be me tailoring it to the fact that I'm maybe looking for a senior level role as an instructional design leader or manager. And I can say instructional designer. I don't have to necessarily put leader in there, but you want to keep it simple and you want the roles to be that you're listening in your headline to.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (37:16.997)
correlate with your experience. don't just, one thing that people have done is, especially educators, and I really do deter against this because some resume reviewers will ask you to do this, is they put an instructional designer on their resume and say they were an instructional designer because they were a teacher. I'm so sorry teachers, you're not instructional designers. It's a totally different realm, it's a totally different expectation. Yes, you have a lot of the transferable skills.

But please don't say you were an instructional designer unless you were really an instructional designer. That's considering lying on your resume. And that's not like, like fibbing. That's like full blown out saying that you have been on the back end. have developed e-learn, you have developed learning experiences, whether that's a modality, online, hybrid, in-person, V-I-L-T, whatever. And you haven't, I'm really sorry. I love you teachers because I'm a former teacher and I understand, but please, please, please don't do that.

because people are gonna see and they're gonna be like, and then they're gonna look at your experience and they're gonna be like, well, this doesn't make any sense. Professional summary. I went with a very shortened professional summary and I update this frequently. I go into the generative AI and you definitely need to have this. One of the things that I will say here and I need to update this because I have 47,000 followers now is you want to be,

You want your, oops, my video went, it'll come back, I promise. You want to be specific enough where you're maybe listening to some statistical information. Yes, the bolding, because again, remember they're skimming at 16 seconds, okay? So you want to make sure that they're seeing the most important pieces of your professional summary. So I've had to update this several times since I've changed roles.

And that's another thing too, is people forget to do that. You don't update this as you change roles and you're using an outdated old resume. As you can see too, if you think about the formatting and what people are putting out, you're drawn like with the bolding to certain pieces of my resume. So like with the bolding, the headers, all those different things, you can find what you need here. It's very organized. And one of the reasons like also too, I love Java applications that were...

The EdUp L&D Podcast (39:35.705)
that say you can submit the link because over here you can use the tabs and use the headers to make it more organized so they can just go and they can find where they want to be. OK. So that's also a good tip. Tip two if you want people to be able to go in and just you know they can click through and say OK I want to know. And this is this is something I point out to my education background and my experience in education and my degrees is at the bottom is at the bottom.

And one of the reasons I do that is because not one time, and I've talked to lot of different people in this field, not one time in my career have I been asked to show my degrees. They're sitting right up there on my shelf. Not one time or have I been asked to provide a transcript. It's important. Now, if it's listed in the job description, OK, it's going to they're probably going to ask you in the application as well. But I don't see this me having a degree.

and instructional technology or design and having a degree or certificate is going to get me the job. I see that as a supporting role situation. So I've moved that completely to the bottom. If we put teacher at the top, yes, they will. And, one of the things I like to put, no, I don't put the years graduated. It's not important. I don't see this stuff as important because at this point,

You know, a lot of people have more experience in the actual industry than, you know, like the degree stopped. It was a stopping point for you. Like your real world experience matters more than the years that you when you graduated from. All right. So I hope you're thinking about this professional summary, how you can update it. You can use chat GPT, but I also want to encourage you to to evaluate what the Gen.A.I. is saying and putting that in there.

this professional summary is going to align some with your personal experiences. As like LinkedIn is a very personal thing to me, like having followers and having a community. So I include that in my professional summary that I'm able to connect with people that talks about relationships. I include things like making sure that I'm honoring my experiences here, but I'm also telling a story.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (42:01.399)
And I think one of the things I would do to update this is I would tell more of the story of my path from educator to where I am now growth marketer. I haven't updated this since April. So it's already outdated because I've done a lot of different things. So think about it in your professional summary. You don't want a lot of jargon either. There's some jargon in here that might you know these people may or may not be in the the L &D industry. So they might not understand a lot of the jargon or the talk that we speak. So you want to be very simple but

come across as a story about you. And a tip I'll share here, we're about almost 45 minutes in, is that one thing people always ask me is, what can you do to stand out? Well, one of the things I would say that you can do besides having your LinkedIn and your portfolio up here is you can create a short video about yourself that they can watch, whether that's using Loom, whether that's using, you know, Record Something, Icepring, or whatever you decide to do.

but this video should be less than five minutes long and it should marry together your professional and personal experience because the resume is such a static document. I mean, I see like Holly, she's done a lot of different things, but like, who is she? You know, like, what does she sound like? know, maybe what does she look like? And this is where you can link to that particular video and it's not gonna mess up the ATS information.

You're not putting that you're not embedding the video in your resume. But I would say that's one thing I've worked with clients in the past has gotten people to the interview process is they've had a nice video that just talks about who they are, whether you're doing like a stream of consciousness thing or you're you're doing a beyond or something like that. And it it really does get people to understand and know you better. And then that adds a little bit of like like pizzazz to your your resume as well. So sag is such a sad doctor.

Then areas of expertise. So one of the things as an instructional designer you need to consider is what we need to know to be in this field. Like what are the things, and you may not know all of these things. If you're coming from a teaching position, one of the things that you could say, I would definitely, you can include accessibility on that because all of us have been in IEP meetings or five or four situations. So you can include that.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (44:23.186)
faculty and staff development. I've done that throughout my entire career. Understanding of like, let's say lesson planning or unit planning, ed tech. So a lot of these areas of expertise teachers have. I would say the things that you may be lacking when it comes to understanding instructional design as an educator is like agile and scrum, unless you participate in some sort of project.

that actually you had to use Agile and Scrum. Project management to a certain extent. You understand synchronous instruction. You understand in-person, so varying modalities. So you might have a little bit of research. You might have a little bit of research to do when it comes to adding in these areas of expertise. And then I also include the technical proficiency next to that. So we haven't even.

We haven't even gotten to, and I'm not saying that this is the best format. I'm just sharing the space of my experience. And I will say that when I apply to jobs, I get replies. When I reply to jobs, I get replies. And I do get kicked out quite often. the past, before I got my job at Yellowdig, it was just constant nos. But then I just started, I started getting some replies after I the job at Yellowdig. So it does work when you're updating things. Technical proficiencies.

These are the technologies that you feel proficient in. I would list these here. And in instructional design, we have a variety. you understand iSpring, you have experience using Adobe Creative Cloud. Those are the big ones. You know, the e-learning, authoring tools, like I mentioned, like iSpring. under, web and Zoom, like solutions, like you, everybody is on Zoom now. Everybody is doing something or Microsoft Teams. So you can include that here.

List the ones that are most applicable to the role that you're applying for. You don't have to list everything because there are things that are not listed here that I have experience in that I have not listed. So it's important for you to kind of make that more, shorten that a bit. And, you know, this is the first third. I'm going to say like right here is the first third of mine. That's where it stops. Okay. So, so far you're making sure at the top you have your name.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (46:46.364)
You have how to contact you, that would be an email address, LinkedIn, link to a portfolio, maybe that video, the titles that you want, or similar to the titles that you're looking for, and also to align with your experience. So you have to be able to back it up. Your professional summary, a simple story about who you are professionally. There may be some personal things added in that. have my LinkedIn community. Areas of expertise, where you feel you've been proficient.

Would you put the LMS you're proficient in? Yeah, put, you know, actually I put, what did I do? I don't think I put LMSs in here. I said LMS administration. So if you've worked with a variety of them, I feel like I just list LMS administration. But if the job is saying that I really want you to know Moodle or Canvas, list Canvas and then say, you know, write LMS admin and then parentheses put Canvas. So then the...

Yeah, you have to know, I was seeing the LMS conversation. So tech proficiency and then what's next is my career experience. my first, first thing. Now my current role, and I want you to take a look at this for yourself is I'm the director of marketing at Yellowdig. Now, if I'm applying to marketing roles, I'm sorry, my ADHD is like making me pick stuff up. I would put this first, but

If I'm looking for something, let's say, in the space of podcasting, I'm gonna move my podcasting one up. Or if I'm looking for something instructional design, I'm gonna move that up. anything that's like more recent where you're like this, I want them to see this first, and then you can go into your most recent role. I think that works, that you can do that.

And of course, as we're wrapping this up, I'm going into writing different things. So just making sure that the experience that you're sharing in the third, top third of the resume, basically lead page one, is something that's going to catch the eye of the roles that you're applying for. I don't think it has to be chronological, if I'm being honest. And sometimes I've seen people who don't list dates. I think...

The EdUp L&D Podcast (49:05.958)
It really depends on the company. Some people care if there's a gap. Some people don't. So I would say that majority than not, you should list a date. But this particular role, like marketing, doesn't necessarily feel very L &D-ish. So that's why I would move my Amazon experience a little bit up. And then they can see.

Certificates I have at the bottom here. So one of the things that I have additional relevant experiences. things that I've done that include like I was an instructional technologist in higher education. So you'll see those different roles. I don't have dates listed there. They're longer ago. If you go out to resources like Teal and other things, Dave Fano and his team, and of course all the iSpring resources in the community,

We're talking about these right now and what to do. So while I can say that I feel like I have a very good structure, I think that you really need to go through yourself and figure out how you want the resume to flow. So I feel like this flows very nicely and also how you want to present yourself. This is again, this is just this is just one piece of the puzzle. It's not just one thing. So you're going to have to consistently update this and

Like I said, not the type of person that says my resume, how long, mine's three pages or four pages. So I don't follow any pages rules. So I would say though that the tip that they read the first third is the first page is where you want to have the good stuff. All right. So I hope you were updating there.

I don't think the two format it shouldn't update that, it does say something about tables. So you might want to double check that. I know there's tools out there where you can submit it to like a pseudo ATS and see if it spits it back out. First, third, or pay and first is most important. Thanks, Marsha. All right. I said a lot. I'm a pause there. Kate, what do we have going on?

The EdUp L&D Podcast (51:25.47)
Two languages. Somebody said something about two languages. I would put that in either the areas of expertise that you're bilingual or have that in as part of your professional summary.

Yeah, great. Thank you so much, Holly. I think our participants got a lot of insights into how to create a perfect resume and I got some insights myself. So I will rewatch it later, definitely. Because yeah, had, and I on the chats, there were like some questions left. But I think we can return to them a bit later. There's so much more to talk about when it comes to this case. I really encourage people as we're waiting to

do the wheel for the seat at the workshop. There's so much more that we've been designing in the background. There's more materials, there's more specifics. I'm sharing all of my secrets. So I really want you to come to that workshop and people in this webinar are gonna get a discount code to get 10 % off. It's very affordable. It's super affordable. And the reason we have to charge is because there's so much

There's so much to do as far as design is concerned. And I really have to sit down and think about the things I want to share. Hi, Jill. I'm not a Terp. I went to UMBC, so I'm a retriever. But yes, I know the USM very well.

Oh, I'm talking about the two day workshop that I have coming up in July. We're about to do a drawing for it and I can shoot a link in the chat if you want to sign up or take a look at what's going to be happening in that workshop. I think I've shared the... you can use this link at the bottom left corner. Yeah, we're going to go really deep more into this stuff in the workshop. So if you can join us, please.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (53:21.31)
If you need me to talk to your boss and say it's a professional development opportunity, invite me to a meeting. I'm happy to tell them that you need this. Whatever you need me to do, I'm happy to advocate for you to come to this workshop. This is something that I've been wanting to do for a very long time and iSpring has given me the platform to do so. So I'm grateful for that. So I look forward to seeing you all there. Okay, great. Sounds fantastic. I can't wait to see the workshop.

I hope to see it myself. I don't know. Okay. And I think we have some questions left, but I'm not sure. Do we have some more time? Let's do about five more minutes and then they can see the recorded questions. if you have to go have a great day. If not, I look forward to answering some questions live. Yeah, great. That sounds great. So thanks everyone who...

joined us today and now we will return to some of the questions that were left. Okay, I think there were a lot of questions in the part where you did the makeover and there I think there were a lot of questions about the titles when he said that don't put teacher, don't put instructional designer title instead of teacher and I think there was a question from Tara.

So what would you put if you're trying to move away from teaching and want to be an instructional designer but have special education experience? Yeah, you're an educator. And that can be seen in a variety of realms as something that's important. You bringing education and pedagogy to corporate is something that is valuable.

because they don't understand the learning sciences. They're just checking the list off to create the C learning or create, you know, the job aid or something like that. But as an educator, you understand like the whole process from start to finish, you know, use backward design, the set of your lessons, your units that that's part of being, I would say educator. If you don't feel comfortable with teacher, educator covers a variety of realms, which includes higher education. Like we call

The EdUp L&D Podcast (55:43.714)
Professors or educators. We say that as part of like I'm an educator, I'm a professor, I'm an instructor. You feel more comfortable using instructor, educator. I would say they're not going to look at the title so much as they are going to look at the responsibilities and the experience. So don't hyper focus too much on that title.

Thank you, thank you for this advice. continuing on this topic, there was a question like, at what point is the key to add instructional designer? If we volunteer and do some actual, or do some actual instructional design work, wouldn't that be enough? If you're volunteering for some sort of nonprofit or you're doing instructional design work, you can definitely add that in. I would say that's a part of the, you have the experience. So yes, I would not.

I would say not to not include that as a double negative, but yes, include that if you have, I'm not when I'm saying that teachers can't shouldn't list instructional designer because people will list instructional designer and they would write everything about their teaching experience. That's not the same thing. That's what that's what I'm trying to deter people from doing. But if you have that experience and instructional designing, you've done it for volunteer work. Yes, 100 % put that on your resume. Great sounds great. Sounds like a plan and.

Okay, let's see. Yeah, there is also a question from Daniel. So I see a lot of jobs ask for AD or SAM experience. I looked into what it was and learned about it and it seems similar to structures that teachers use just for adults. Should I put that I have experience with it or no? Say that one more time. have experience. Oh, the ADSAM question? Yeah.

So I looked in the strategies that you just for a dog should I put them

The EdUp L&D Podcast (57:39.792)
Addie and Sam are things that are typically used with adult learners, I would say. And I think I answered this a little bit, is that you have experience with pedagogy as an instructor, and you might have some experience with adult learning theory, which is Andragoggy. So you could put that. But if you haven't specifically gone through the whole process of Addie, which is needs analysis all the way to evaluation, I wouldn't list that there because it's different than it is in the education space.

And corporate and education, they are similar, like if you're going into higher education, but I wouldn't list that if you don't directly have that experience. But if you have trained other teachers or you have trained other adults, I would say that it's important for you to put that experience in there and that you've done needs analysis, you've done design, you've done development, you've done evaluation, you're going back through the whole thing, implementation, and you've done that with people, you can put it on there.

A lot of the answers to these questions are if you have completed it, you have experience in it, put on the resume. If you don't, don't lie about it. Yeah, it's a great advice. Universal advice. Yeah, don't lie about it. Okay. Okay, let's see. I saw that some questions popped up in the chat just now.

Okay. I see a question from Linda. So what is the platform you use for your profiling and how do you share projects in your profile if confidential or client owned or it's materials? Is that about the portfolio? Yeah, portfolio. think portfolio. Yeah. So, um, iSpring does have something that you can use to do your portfolio, but there, there are other things out there as well. Um, are you talking about like developing stuff? Are you talking about like housing, the content information? I think I would need some clarity around that before I answer that question.

Yelda, if you can let us know in chat, but I think it's about housing things. OK, so I would definitely recommend some of iSpring stuff. I've wanting to ship some of my stuff over that, but also to the Google sites, if you need something fairly quick, if you're transitioning out and you don't have a lot, that stuff is free. So you can stand that up. I stood a portfolio up in about 20 minutes. Mine needs work. And iSpring has all the resources to tell you how to do it, so you might as well.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (59:57.95)
Might as well use that too. Yeah. Maybe I can share a link a bit later in the chat. Yeah. Yeah. Remember we did that whole thing. We did a workshop. We did a webinar. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. I can share a link to the webinar. Just I will need some time to find it. And okay. Let's see. Okay. Let's see. What are some questions that we left?

The EdUp L&D Podcast (01:00:31.774)
OK, does the ID program like the edX where I created a course count is experience? Yes. Yes, it does.

The EdUp L&D Podcast (01:00:49.278)
Great. Yeah. So a question from Melissa, would you recommend Wix for your portfolio? I recommend whatever you feel comfortable using and that's going to help you because all these platforms have the same kind of bells and whistles. They just do things a little bit differently. So if you feel comfortable with Wix, use Wix. I don't recommend like necessarily paying for anything if you're just getting started. Maybe when things become a little bit more, you have more

multimodal things that you're sharing. had a lot of different projects. You might need to purchase something, but if you're first starting out, I would say use the free stuff and Wix does, I know it does have free stuff. Okay, great. And I just shared the link to the webinar about the portfolio that we did with Holly previously. yeah. Okay. Let's, let's find some like the last question maybe I think.

I'm a bit lost in the chat. So yeah, I there's a lot of questions. Data people, if you're still here, check, come, come talk to me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to answer your question. We had almost a hundred people in here. So it's a lot to keep track of all the questions. And we were already going over by eight minutes. So if you have a question, just ask me on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to answer that or set up like a quick coffee chat or something with you. So thank you so much. That sounds great. Thank you, Holly again for sharing all this insights, tips with us and thank you everyone.

for being such an attentive audience and stay until the end. So much people are still here. So thank you again. Yeah. Appreciate all your comments in the chat. That's great. So hope you have enjoyed. Take care and hope to see you next time and see you on our workshop later. yeah. Have a great day.