Accounting Student Resume Tips
As a student, writing your first resume can be a difficult task. Resume rating is not a skill that is easily learned by many and it's certainly not helpful that Google provides a variety of different insights that aren't always correct for an accounting student. To help clear up that confusion, I'm going to share some insights on what I believe is the proper way to set up an accounting student's resume. Let's jump in!
Ordering
Before we jump into each section, The issue of ordering needs to be addressed because it is the most common error I see on student resumes. The rule is: The piece of information that will be most important to a recruiter when screening your resume goes at the top of the document. If you are already a few years into your career, this is your most recent working experience. However, if you are an accounting student looking for an entry-level position, your education information is more important. Campus recruiters care most about your CPA eligibility and graduation date, and if that cannot be picked up quickly by a scanning software or a lazy recruiter, your resume might find its way to the no pile very quickly.
Education
The education section of your resume should include:
Your school
Your major
Any minors or certificates as applicable
Your expected graduation date
Your expected CPA eligibility date
Your GPA or Major GPA (if over 3.0), use whichever one is more favorable
If you are hurting for space, you may include things like student athlete status or scholarship awards to help fill out the resume.
Professional Experience or Working Experience
For an accounting student, the next most relevant thing to you finding a job is the experience you have gained through other jobs and internships. In this section, you want to use a traditional bullet point style summary of your accomplishments in your previous positions. The main things that students get wrong are:
Not posting non-corporate work experience - There are a considerable number of skills that are needed for a career in accounting (especially in public accounting) like communication, teamwork, and client service. Students that can demonstrate these skills in former jobs like ones in the service industry should include them where possible because they will make a difference.
Not diversifying demonstrated skills - Your resume should be a reflection of a collection of skills that will help get you the interview, so you don’t need to have every line showing that you can do data entry or work in Excel. The best student resumes that I have seen try to fit the highest number of relevant skills as possible, which means carefully phrasing bullets to not repeat skillsets where possible.
Not having any work experience - Believe it or not, some students come to me with a blank slate of work experience and all I can tell them is that they need to find a job ASAP. It doesn’t matter if it’s serving at a restaurant, working part time on campus, or stocking shelves at a grocery store. Anything that allows you the opportunity to demonstrate any skill needed to succeed in the professional world is better than nothing!
This is also the most important part of any resume and the intricacies of what language to use to describe your experiences deserves its own separate blog. For now, I recommend getting the fundamental information on resume writing from another source and avoiding the common mistakes above!
Leadership or Volunteer Experience
After real working experience, leadership and volunteer experience can be a great way to demonstrate those key skills that employers are looking for. Being an officer of a student organization or an active member in a volunteer group is a great way to bulk up this section of your resume. Depending on the amount of space you have already filled out, you may want to consider having a smaller number of bullets for this section.
Skills
This is where you communicate other relevant skills that may not be apparent from your experience above. For students, the most common items here are foreign languages, and a proficiency in various programs such as Excel or QuickBooks that were obtained through courses or outside work.
The Filler Stuff
Is there a section on your student resume that isn’t one of the areas listed above? It’s probably filler - something that helps to fill the page that is better than a blank space. Here are some examples of filler areas on a resume and why they aren’t as valuable as the sections listed above:
Personal Statement / Objective - The point of a resume is to get an interview; the point of an interview is to get the job. The interview is inherently the more human element of this whole process, and using up space to tell the interviewer about yourself when that’s the first question of the interview anyways is a waste of the valuable real estate on your resume.
Relevant Coursework - Employers don’t really know the difficulty of the courses you are taking, and they cannot rely on any specific course to teach certain professional skills, especially for accountants. While this section may be helpful in demonstrating your commitment to your education early on, I would replace it with real work experience as soon as possible.
Class projects - For accounting students, class projects can be a great way to learn and apply certain skills inside the classroom, but they are far less relevant from a resume perspective because we value real-world experience so highly. It’s better than nothing, but I would try to replace this as soon as I can with some more tangible experience.
When it comes to resumes and interviewing, I tend to repeat two things to my students and mentees very often:
Recruiting and finding a job is a numbers game. Do your best to optimize your resume to appeal to the right recruiters, systems, and employers because it may take a lot of applications to find the right position coming out of school. Take great care in preparing your resume because you don’t want to give anyone a reason to not interview you. Try to take advantage of every inch of space you have on your resume and ensure that the space is being used as effectively as it can be! As you get experience, your resume will improve and evolve over time, but don’t wait!
The point of a resume is to get an interview, the point of an interview is to get the job. Far too often I see students that say “I can just talk about that” when I ask them about their resume. They don’t understand that if they don’t put enough context in the resume itself, they won’t get that chance. In today’s competitive environment for certain jobs, it’s critically important to understand what is best conveyed on paper, and what is best communicated during a live interview. Carefully planning out talking points for an interview should go hand in hand with crafting a good resume!
As an accounting student, you can never be too prepared when it comes to your resume, so get started today!