What is a Consulting Resume?

If you are preparing to go into consulting, your resume must be tailored toward how consulting firms expect them. But what is a consulting resume? What are firms looking for? How do you convey to them who you are in a way they they want to see it? Firms receive so many resumes, your resume will get 10 seconds to make the right impression. It must be formatted in they way they want it. And it must give them a sense of your background and experience at a glance. Watch Jenny Rae as she outlines how to format your resume, and how to convey yourself properly in your resume or CV.

What Is A Consulting Resume YouTube Transcription

Hi! Welcome to Management Consulted. I'm Jenny Rae, the Managing Director of Management Consulted. Today we're starting off a long series on consulting resumes, cover letters, and CVs. We're really excited to bring this series to you because these are the bulk of the questions we get coming through our website.

Now some of the questions that you might be asking are:

1. What overall needs to be conveyed in the cover letter or the resume?
2. How should you convey it?

Overall Needs To Be Conveyed In A Cover Letter Or Resume

So those are two of the things that I'm going to cover today. The first, we've actually talked about in previous videos that I'll give you a quick recap here. Essentially you have two key parts of your background. One is your education, which encompasses your leadership experience, the other is your work experience and your professional experience. A lot of the time there's a little bit of a blurred line between the two, and in a future week, we're going to go through some of the sections that you'll actually use. So some of the key focus here is on not only conveying a heavy work experience or a heavy educational experience but a really good balance between the two of them.

Three Ways That You're Going To Actually Present This Experience.

1. Your format
2. Your content or your story
3. The actual words that you use to describe it.

I'm going to talk about those really briefly in term.

Formatting Your Consulting Resume Or CV

For formatting, a company has about 10 seconds to review your resume or CV. In that 10 seconds, they're going to make a judgment about whether or not you are professional enough to perform the job that they're asking you to do. Your resume or CV needs to be clearly and cleanly formatted. You have a very small selection of the font types that they would be interested in seeing you use. They want to see all black and white resumes, and in particular, they're really interested in seeing a one to two-page resume or CV from which it's very easy to extract information - which brings me to point number two.

Your Story And Background

Point number two is that they're interested in seeing very clearly your story or the flow of your background coming together in the actual overview. And basically what they're interested in seeing is that you have some consistent demonstrations of excellence and some consistent demonstrations of interest. They want to see that you have a background in business, but maybe you have a specific focus in life sciences, if that's what they're looking for. So they want to see that you're not too heavy on one thing but you have some consistency. They don't want to see you jumping around in different kinds of jobs without a story to pull it all together. So the first thing that's important is your format. The second is your story.

Word Choice In Consulting Resumes

The third and possibly the most important where we focus most of our editing services time and energy on is the actual word choice. So after you've pulled the format together and you've got your overall story lined up - how do you actually talk about the businesses that you worked for? If you were in a technical role, are you able to convey what was happening in the business overall? Do you use excellent context cues? Do you use long sentences that are difficult to read or short bullet points? Are you very clear about the way that you communicate both your actions as well as the actions of the team or the overall organization?

Summary

So across the board, there are multiple ways that you can really convey the clarity and your ability to become an excellent consultant. First is formatting, second content and story, and third will be the word choice that you use. If you have more questions, please don't hesitate to contact us at team@managementconsulted.com.

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