Standing Out or Blending In: Which Resume Strategy is Right for You?
Featuring Career Development Expert Minto Roy
Last month we talked about some resume basics and Alanna ended her advice by saying: “You want to compete on a level playing field and you can best help yourself do that by building a resume which is formatted to blend in with the other applicants and stand out only in terms of its achievements.” That turned out to cause a bit of controversy as a number of people wrote to us to say they thought advising immigrants to “blend in” is like telling them to assimilate and abandon their culture. That’s certainly not what we were trying to say, so some clarification seems to be in order.
Minto Says:
Rule number one: take your career advice from someone who has achieved a fair level of career success themselves, and who has no reason to say what s/he is saying other than your best interests. Ask the same question to ten people, chances are you’ll get at least five or six and maybe even ten different answers. There is a difference between having an opinion and having an informed opinion and you need to know the difference before you start implementing advice. Also make sure whomever is dispensing the advice isn’t trying to justify his or her own limiting beliefs or lack of progress by “educating” you that something you want to do can’t be done, or that the way Canadians do something “isn’t right for people like us.”
Let’s be clear: no one in this column or in the PCMG community of career professionals is suggesting that you need to assimilate to get ahead. We are saying, however, that you need to communicate in a way that you will be understood and that you need to integrate yourself into Canadian society by making a place for yourself in the professional workforce.
Communicating to be understood means using common vocabulary, format, style and tone. It means learning not just how to speak English but how to speak Canadian – and then the dialect of Canadian that is used by your industry or company culture. Engineers have patterns of communication which are different than those of Marketing Channel experts, Film Producers or University History Professors. And anyone from whom you would take advice should speak all of those languages and more.
Minto Roy
President
CareersToday Canada
www.careerstodaycanada.com
www.mintoroy.net