For many weeks, you have spent endless hours every night, after coming home from your office, revising your essays. You have done so by carefully studying the programs for each school you are applying to and by getting lots of advice and recommendations. But that’s no problem; there’s nothing left to do except fill in the application forms and update your resume, which shouldn’t take more than an hour. You have already thought about this and decided that the easiest way is to revise the most recent version of your resume, which you drafted to get your last job.
Without a doubt, you could content yourself with a quick revision of that document. But in doing so, you risk passing up an opportunity that could perhaps make that crucial difference between your application and the 8,000 others, or at least keep you in the running. by illustrating and reinforcing the messages and examples developed in your essays, your resume can add more weight to your candidature and improve your chances for success.
Characteristics of a Good Resume for an MBA Application
To measure the potential role of the resume as a supporting document for your MBA application, it’s useful to recall briefly what the admissions panels are looking to evaluate in it, beyond its informative function (the number of years of professional experience, jobs and posts held, previous employers, etc.). In fact, what admissions officers are most commonly looking for in a resume is usually based on three specific elements of the candidate’s professional background: cohere, diversity and success.
A relatively coherent background. Ideally, the different stages of a young professional’s career will be connected to one another by the opportunities that the candidate will have known how to create for himself, either within or outside of this company, in line with his long-term career goals. Thus an engineer’s experience in technology will lend more credibility to a start-up project.
Diverse experiences. The richness of your background is every bit as important as its coherence. The admissions officers therefore expect to find experiences in a candidate’s background that will allow him to better grasp the teachings offered by the MBA curriculum. Thus some of the programs have established a formula of previous international and multidisciplinary training experience for managers and leaders. This includes experience in managing teams, responsibility for projects, the experience of setting up a business. All of these will undoubtedly reinforce your application to one the theses programs.
Visible signs of success. IN order to evaluate your professional performance, the admission officers will measure the duration of each of your jobs, the evolution of the responsibilities you have had, and the progression of your salaries and bonuses, as well as the results you got both individually and as a member of a group, or better even, as a manager of a tem.
