Hi, @AIQ

@Old_Lamplighter Hello!

Oh that is weird, I just noticed the chat does not show your full name on the left ... I don't think it's a length problem; it does show the much longer names for Pointy Haired Boss and Araucaria

@AIQ that's due to your screen size

I can see all Usernames completely

haha ooppss

:D

@AIQ I'm just old then? :D

I'm Dar

@Old_Lamplighter Haha - Old_ Lamplig - It is because I have the chat zoomed in ...

@AIQ How are your spirits, BTW? Not getting down on yourself, I hope.

@Old_Lamplighter Haha I am good thanks for asking ... You know "lofi"? I am listening to that ... It's kind of really nice slow jazz or something ... gives like a nice cafe vibe ...

Wow so many active moderators in the chat ...

@AIQ my musical tastes are eclectic enough to drive the algorithms absolutely mad. I like everything from Mozart to Metal.

@AIQ yes, DC and Lillenthal are very active in here.

I'm in a strange mood tonight, but at least I'm not as pooped as Lillenthal has been lately, some of the posts on the site have been aging badly.

I mainly lurk around in small SE sites ... this is probably the biggest one for me, although I haven't really posted anything on the main site ...

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. I have read your comments under my answer, however the phrasing you suggest is conveying the same meaning as what I already said in the answer: Avoid slang, it's fine to use contractions. With all due respect, I don't think it's a harmful answer; the current vote and the fact that OP accepted it hints that it's at least decent advise. Thus, I won't change my answer.

@AIQ this site is usually fun. We don't take ourselves too seriously, and there is great advice given out

I know your expertise is of linguistics, and I'm sure that from a purely linguistic point of view you are right about using contractions helps spoken dialog to be more fluid. However, this is TWP and our focus here is of Professional Advise (if this question would have been asked on English site I'm sure different POVs would be given in answers).

Fluid is not the same as professional, and I fear you are mixing those, thus, I feel your comment is tangential to the core of what OP is asking and to the core of my answer. Finally, there's always room for one more answer if you care to share your perspective of this from a more Linguistic angle.

@AIQ Youtube's LoFi playlist with the anime girl image comes to mind**

@DarkCygnus Yes that's what I meant; it's very relaxing sometimes ... helps me calm my nerves ...

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. so, yes, please do share your answer if you care, I'm interested in reading it :) finally, I'll prune the noisy comments from the answer

@@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. I read your comments as well, and if you're going to put that much into comments, you would be better off writing an answer of your own

@AIQ yeah LoFi is great for studying and working

although sometimes there are tasks I do that I prefer not having any sort of music playing

@AIQ I'm going to have to check that out

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. I did, however, remove a side comment I included in parentheses on my answer, as that could have been an undue generalization or spurious conclusion

Well folks... see you later. I'm a bit exhausted. It has been a busy day at work

I am having to fully change my resume ... a career advisor at my university had a look and said it is a very good resume for research/data analysis work in general but won't get me anywhere in the retail sector ... Like my "Professional Summary" or "Summary of Skills" part at the top basically talks about my research experiences and my project management skills ... He said that I need to change all that and focus more on communication skills, managing teams, organizing, etc.

@AIQ yes, you need to tailor your resume to the job your are trying to get

@Old_Lamplighter If you did some work say 5-6 years ago, and learnt some specific skills (which you did not use in your more recent years), will you list them in a resume, or will you not because those skills are not from more recent jobs?

@AIQ You list everything on your resume that demonstrates that you can do the job. An old fart like me is listing things back to the 1990s.

I want to highlight some of my experiences in university clubs - organizing events and activities, managing teams, budgeting, etc. What is a good section heading for this? I need people to look at this section because there are some skills that can translate well for some of the jobs I am looking at. I don't want to say "Extracurricular activities".

I have noticed that career advisors and others I consulted to review my resume overlooked this section most of the time when it said "Extracurricular activities". Only when I specifically mentioned the skills I learnt through club-participation, that is when they noticed that part.

Like I don't want people to see "Extracurricular activities" and think "Ah ... board games and pokemon cards" and then stop reading.

Are any of these acceptable? "Leadership and Service", "Leadership and Community Engagement", or "Leadership Experiences"?

@Old_Lamplighter @Lilienthal

@motosubatsu @Kaz

what am I (or any other typical site visitor for that matter) supposed to do with this answer that has 3/4 written in non-English language? Is it OK, or maybe rude, or irrelevant, or some sort of trolling, there is no way for us to tell. Per my reading of network wide FAQ we are expected to flag such answers, aren't we?

@gnat I think it's OK, as it's not intended for the first 3/4 to be understood/translated. Just there to demonstrate what it's like when you can't understand something. You could replace it with gobbledygook and achieve the same effect.

10K!

@Kaz agreed.. also 'grats on the hitting 10k

@gnat I understood it, and the point, made very effectively, thus the upvotes. I'm not flagging it because the answer itself is in English, as per the FAQ, the German text is only there to demonstrate how it is difficult to read things not in the language understood by the shop.

@AIQ "Additional experience" would be the best heading to use. Now, this is just me, but when I see anything like those phrases you mentioned, I am a bit put off by it. Buzzwords tend to count against you.

And in today's news, Google-search programmers continue to be the bane of my existence

@DarkCygnus Well, it isn't so harmful now that you've removed the stuff about not using contractions in speech being more professional! (It's still misleading in the sense that it reinforces the erroneous idea that the forms used in connected speech are 'slang'. So readers here may be miseducated by your answer. However,) it's now 1000% better. Thanks on behalf of us users. :-)

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. Who are "us users"?

@Old_Lamplighter People who use this site to get advice (used in contrast here with member who contribute and curate).

@Old_Lamplighter Que?! There was no threat to pester. The "pestering" (also known as constructive feedback) was already there. A threat constitutes an intimation that someone's going to do something a) bad, but more importantly b) in the future. What piffle.

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. No, a threat can also mean continuing bothersome behavior unless conditions improve, such as in the old joke "Beatings will continue until morale improves". We've already determined that your behavior is bad, as it is annoying multiple users. By the way, if you are going to be obsessing with linguistics, you may want to a bit more judicious with your articles and subject-verb agreement.

Your sentence , “used in contrast here with member who contribute and curate” should have been written either as “used in contrast here with a member who contribute and curate” or “used in contrast here with members who contribute and curate”

You also don't get to judge your own contributions as constructive, as at least two people disagree with you on that point as well.

To put it bluntly, your comments are non-constructive, pedantic screed.

@Old_Lamplighter :55633092 I am still uncomfortable with that. My German is too weak to catch whether this answer doesn't contain some subtle/idiomatic offensive stuff. And it feels even worse when I imagine this as general approach over here, are we going to accept any mess in any other language as soon as poster claims it's there only to make a point? As for upvotes, forget it, it's a hot question meaning high score indicates only that it entertained a bunch of passers-by from Stack Overflow

@gnat there's nothing subtle or idiomatic in it, although I would have likely taken a different approach by giving an example of a variable named Arschmitohren and then explain that it would translate to "complete idiot" in a similar way as penejo does in Spanish, or deku in Japanese

and used that as an example of why you want to have linguistic standards, but the point was made quite amusingly, and very effectively.

I am less concerned for the rigors of standards than the effect

@Old_Lamplighter Got it! thanks!

@AIQ Another bit of advice: Don't pay ANYONE to do your resume. I can spot professionally done resumes a mile away, and the only thing they tell me is that the person didn't write it themselves. That can bite you hard on the backside. You can get HELP, as you are doing here, but don't lie, and don't have someone else write it for you

Now, of course you want to present yourself in the most favorable light you can, but not in such a fashion that your resume writes a check your backside can't cash

@Old_Lamplighter Yes, absolutely. I have never had anyone do anything to my resume. To be honest, the career advisor wasn't of much help ... The only thing he said is that I need to change a lot of things (didn't say which ones) which I already knew and which is why I contacted him ...

So my thinking was that the skills I picked up doing say research work, are somewhat transferable to sales and management positions or any other positions ... For example, "interpersonal and communication skills" can be obtained if one managed projects and were part of a team and had tasks delegated to him ... And they can be obtained in many other ways. These skills are not only gained through "Customer Service" related work.

What I am trying to say is that may be I have some of these transferable skills, but I think it is wrong to assume that the hiring manager will think so deeply about this and connect the skills from say "Managed and led a project on Employment Insurance"

@AIQ You want everything to be "Challenge, Action, Result" on your resume, or "Action, Result". "Managed and led a project on employment insurance" should be "Led Employment Insurance project delivering early and under budget saving company X dollars" or something to that effect

You don't want to use filler words, buzzwords, or anything that doesn't show you as actually doing something

"participated in" is especially weak. The most important thing is "Show, don't tell". You don't want to say, either on a resume or on an interview "I have great personal skills", you want to say "Successfully resolved conflicts", or "obtained buy in from stakeholders" or "Directed diverse team of people from various backgrounds and skill levels"

Paint pictures with your words.

Hard to find the line between "Sell yourself" and "Don't use buzzwords" ...

@Old_Lamplighter

I really appreciate all the help, it means a lot, thank you!!

@Old_Lamplighter I write lots of peoples resumes because most people here have difficulty writing even in their own language (including the academics and lawyers)

and being fluent in English is a big plus in the job market so they all want to say they're fluent which is difficult to do if in fact they barely understand it.

@Kilisi Things are probably a bit different there, but if I'm interviewing someone who sounds different from their resume, I'm not going to recommend them.

@AIQ You sell yourself without using buzzwords by demonstrating and quantifying whenever possible. "Proactively instituted a new paradigm resulting in more synergy" is a bunch of nonsense. "Implemented changes that increased efficiency by 20%" is selling yourself.

@Old_Lamplighter I see, I am afraid I don't have any experience that I can quantify yet ...

@Old_Lamplighter Oh, but my writing is much better than my speaking. I probably never sound like my resume or any other writing ...

Sometimes I will pronounce a word horribly even though I know the correct pronunciation ... My speech gets all messed up when I try to speak at the same pace as my native language haha

Analysis -> uh·na·luh·suhs (Correct way)

@AIQ You may write better, but it is still you, and that will still shine through on the interview. You do have experience you can quantify. Everybody does.

What I have been doing for so long -> Ana.lie.sis

If you did anything more than walk in and stand staring at the wall, you can quantify it.

@AIQ If you're nervous, maybe this will give you some perspective. I'm autistic, hearing impaired, have an LD called dysgraphia, which means I cannot write much at all. I also bounced back from being homeless. Trust me on this one, you'll be fine

If I can survive an interview, you can too :D

@Old_Lamplighter You see I don't get why my university career advisors don't teach these things. I did some resume workshops and they kept talking about things that I already know - format, typos, etc.

@AIQ I did teach these things :D

that's why I come here, so I can pass on what I've learned over the dacades

<= Old curmudgeon

@AIQ you read considerable amount of books, don't you.

@Old_Lamplighter Amazing ... may be I can trouble you with how to quantify a few things I did that I love dearly ...

Sure thing, no problem :D

Someone said we are hiring for part-time positions, and I said "I was actually interested in permanent positions ... oh sorry, I mean full-time"