The next class assignment is designed to help you prepare your resume. But instead of preparing your resume, I would like to work with you on formatting and preparing a fictional resume first. I have chosen to use my father’s name, Richard E. Hyatt, as he liked to write it and to fictionalize his work experiences for our purposes here. I am taking this approach for two reasons. Many people have fairly simple backgrounds. My own resume will provide you with an example of a businessman’s resume. This will give you a different perspective on resume writing.
I’m going to tell you about Mr. Hyatt’s fictional work experience and let you prepare a resume for him. In reality, my father claimed to have a third grade education and while he could read and write, reading and writing were things I rarely saw him do. During his life, he had three types of jobs, mostly working as a carpenter. But for several years he had his own janitorial business, cleaning mostly office buildings and sometimes homes. He also worked for about a year in a plant nursery. Much of what you read below is true. He did sell eggs and had nine children, all of whom are still alive today (the children, not the eggs). But my father was born in 1914. Also, my father always said, “I can find work anywhere in three days” and having moved 18 times when I was a child, I knew he could. He was never out of work for more than a day or two.
The information I provide you is intentionally misleading and more information than you can use in a resume. The same happens in our own lives. We don’t need to provide our wives’ employer’s names, for example. But I will provide extra information so you can decide what to use on the resume and what to leave out. Some information will be provided which you will have to reorganize and format into a resume. The idea here is to force you to think and to practice before you write your own resume. The reading material is also not “dumbed down;” that is, it is written in normal English to force you to study it carefully.
Richard had been interested in baseball as a young man and with the help of his young wife decided to volunteer as a coach for a local PeeWee baseball team. His team did poorly, but that didn’t matter to him. He was named “Coach of the Year” for four years straight from 2000 to 2003 because of his leadership and calm manner as a coach, by the other coaches.
He and Dorothy liked to go camping and often packed up their young family on weekend and headed to the mountains. I’ve neglected to tell you they moved from New Jersey to Estes, Colorado in April of 1999. They would stay there until the winter of 2003-2004 set in. At that time, the economy in the area was failing and they found it more and more difficult to find work. Finally, they decided to move to Franklin, North Carolina where Dorothy’s parents had retired.
Life in Franklin was not what they expected and for a few months Richard was out of work again. Finally, in June of 2004, Richard found work as a carpenter’s helper for Moore’s Construction Company building houses. This retirement area was growing rapidly as was Richard and Dorothea’s family. In 2009, Mr. Moore promoted Richard to lead carpenter and Richard supervised his own crew of four to five people, including himself. As the lead, he was responsible for keeping track of the crew’s work hours, supervising work, planning each day’s work, picking up materials at the lumber yard, and acting as a typical crew foreman.
Mr. Moore was not a good business planner, and with an economic downturn, had started losing money. Finally, he declared bankruptcy in September 2013 and so Mr. Hyatt is looking for work again.