Resume/Branding Advice for Job Seekers
Over the past several years, as the Placement Services Subcommittee has worked with the American Institute of Physics to expand our Career Services Website capabilities, we have noticed a disturbing trend. Many of those individuals electing to post their resumes online have posted resumes that while perhaps serving to list their training and accomplishments, do little to impress the reader about the person’s capability to put together a clear and informative document. The resume is the first, and sometimes only, impression a hiring manager will get of an individual applying for a Medical Physics position. Therefore, the Placement Services Subcommittee thought it important to provide some advice and examples that would educate and guide individuals in constructing a clear and professional looking resume.
Towards that goal, we have created a fictional applicant named Medical Physicist, who is looking for a job in the exciting field of Medical Physics. Using the same personal information about M. Physicist, several of our members constructed both simple formatted and more advanced formatted resumes to showcase techniques to present M. Physicist’s best face forward. Among our examples, is a version of M. Physicist who just graduated from residency, as well as a version of M. Physicist who is relatively established in his/her career. In each case our members tried to explain some of their reasons for choosing the formatting options they did, and what information they felt was worth highlighting in each section.
We encourage all of those who find themselves seeking a new career position to look over the examples and comments we have accumulated here. It is our intent that these examples do not remain static, but can improve with active feedback from the medical physics community. If you feel you have better way of presenting M. Physicist, we encourage you to outline your thoughts and submit feedback to the committee through the link at the bottom of the page. We also highly encourage job seekers to actively borrow the formatting of these resumes for use in their own. In this way, we hope to raise the professional standards of the medical physics job seeking community as a whole.
The Good Stuff
Resume Writing Tools:
Here you will find a document that the committee members each agreed was an excellent first step to writing a good resume. Namely, just list out on scrap paper What, When, and Where of each of the things you want to list in your resume. In this step, don’t worry about formatting, just get all of the items down in one location of what you want to convey about yourself.
These three links show M. Physicist as a young professional just recently graduated from residency.
The next three links show M. Physicist as a professional well established in his/her career, and looking for a more senior level position
These links showcase some of the pitfalls the Placement Services Subcommittee saw many resumes fall into.
This article goes over a topic that evoked much discussion among subcommittee members, the Statement of Purpose, and what role it has on or off of a professional resume.
Building your Brand:
One branding tool available to promote yourself is LinkedIn. Although the AAPM and the Placement Services Subcommittee do not benefit from, nor specifically endorse LinkedIn, it can be a strategic option for career promotion and branding. Alaina Levine, through a partnership with AIP, provides a basic template for establishing a LinkedIn profile.
As we stated above, these notes and suggestion are not meant to be definitive, but to give a good starting point for many who need solid advice. Additionally, we would like to see the content of this area grow with feedback from the Medical Physics job seeker community, as well as feedback from those hiring medical Physicists. With that in mind we have established the following email address to allow feedback to the content of this page.
The Placement Services Subcommittee (2013)Non scholae, sed vitae discimus