Landing a great graduate internship is an important stepping stone towards a fulfilling career. The process starts with crafting a resume that makes a strong impression on your potential employer and lets them know why they should hire you.
Optimise Your Resume For A Graduate Internship
This guide will provide you with practical ways to optimise your resume for graduate internship opportunities. If you want to highlight your strengths and give yourself the best chance of landing your dream internship, you’ve come to the right place.
Use A Professional Format
The design and layout of your resume go a long way in making a good first impression. Choose a layout that is clean, concise and professional. You want to use simple formats as these are easier for application tracking software to read. If you use an AI resume maker, you can guarantee you’ll be ticking all the boxes whilst also being able to maintain a clean CV design and style.
And speaking of clean styles, it’s wise to use clear headings and consistent formatting to make it easy for potential employers to read through. Avoid using lots of fonts and colours. Choose a simple font like Times New Roman and stick to one or two colours throughout the resume.
Overall, you want to make your resume as simple as possible. A possible exception to this is if the role you’re applying for requires creative skills. However, it should still be possible to demonstrate your design skills while keeping your resume organised.
Tailor Your Resume to Each Job
It’s essential that each resume is tailored to the internship you are applying for. Every role is different and requires a certain set of abilities, so using a generic resume suggests to the potential employer that you don’t have the specific skills needed for the internship.
To properly tailor a resume, start by carefully reading the job description and highlighting the skills and qualifications the employer is looking for. Use these keywords throughout your resume and connect your work experience to the words in the role advertised.
This not only demonstrates to the human resume readers that you possess relevant skills and have thoroughly read the application, but also helps your resume pass application tracking systems that employers often use to initially filter out candidates that don’t match their application criteria.
Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills: Which Is More Important?
Hard skills are industry-specific skills like being able to use a specific software. Soft skills are personal qualities that improve your ability to contribute in a working environment. These include good communication, problem-solving and teamwork.
Showcasing a mix of hard and soft skills improves your resume by proving your well-roundedness, so include a balance of both.
Highlight Relevant Experience
When applying for internships, you want to emphasise all your previous work experience that is relevant to the role you’re applying for. This can include part-time work, full-time work, volunteering roles and other industry-related projects you’ve worked on.
Bullet points are a great way to encapsulate your past roles in a concise, readable way. When possible, quantify your achievements. For instance, instead of writing ‘assisted in sales negotiations’, you could instead write ‘improved conversion rate by 30%.’ This shows your potential employer that you can make a tangible contribution to their business. You can then go into greater depth about this experience in your cover letter.
An internship is key to your future career, and you want to secure one that follows on from the work experience you already have.
Include a Summary
Include a summary at the top of your resume to give potential employers an idea of who you are and why they should hire you. This section should be concise, but give an overview of your best qualities. Highlight one or two past roles and sum up what makes you perfect for the role.
It’s also crucial to tell your employer why you’re applying to the specific role. Do some research into the company and talk about how the role’s unique attributes align with your career goals.
Highlight Academic Achievements
As a graduate student, your academic achievements will be a big part of your resume. Create a section dedicated to detailing them. Include all the degrees you’ve received or are in the process of receiving, relevant courses you’ve taken, and your GPA.
Your ‘education’ section is also where you should highlight specific achievements. Were you president of a club? Did you receive honors? Was your thesis nominated for an award? These are all things potential employers will take into account when deciding whether or not to hire you.
Proofread & Edit Thoroughly
Spelling and grammar mistakes in a resume reflect poorly on a candidate as they show poor attention to detail. So, brush up on your English communication skills and make sure your resume is error-free.
Proofread your resume several times and fix any spelling or grammar mistakes you catch. Proofreading also allows you to make larger-scale changes as needed. You don’t have to do this on your own: run your resume through Grammarly or similar online tools and show it to friends you trust. A second pair of eyes is always useful when trying to eliminate mistakes and improve your chances.
Provide Powerful References
References are not always required but can be beneficial as they provide third-party proof that what you’ve claimed in your resume is true. If you are unable to provide references at the time of application, you can include a line that states you can provide references upon request.
Choose references that are as recent as possible, and obviously, those who will speak positively about your character and skills. These can include previous supervisors, professors and colleagues.
Make sure to ask your references for permission and who might be contacting them, before including them in your resume.
Graduate internships give you a massive advantage in today’s competitive job market, and a strong resume is key to securing one. Understand the role you’re applying for and create a resume that shows why you’re the best candidate for the job.
In this article, we’ve gone through some key tips to ensure your resume is perfect for whichever graduate internship you’re applying for. Incorporate them into your resume today and land that dream internship, to turn into your dream job.
Hi, I’m Dev Kirtonia, Founder & CEO of Dev Library. A website that provides all SCERT, NCERT 3 to 12, and BA, B.com, B.Sc, and Computer Science with Post Graduate Notes & Suggestions, Novel, eBooks, Biography, Quotes, Study Materials, and more.
