There are diverse views about how one should produce the professional résumé. Until just a few years ago, there were only a few formal college degrees in technical communication, and as one implication of this, there are a diversity of opinions about how best to create résumés to demonstrate one's competencies in the field. Advice about creating professional résumés in the fields surrounding technical communication and usability vary widely, but interviewers tend often to be very interested in experience and portfolios with examples of skills.
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When you're applying for a faculty position with a college or university, the cover letter is your first chance to make a strong impression as a promising researcher and teacher. Below you'll find some strategies for presenting your qualifications effectively in an academic context.
Purdue University (1998). Careers>Resumes>Cover Letters
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Action Verbs to Describe Skills, Jobs, and Accomplishments in Employment Documents
These are some words commonly used to describe your skills on your resume.
Purdue University (2004). Careers>Resumes>Glossary
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Annotated Cover Letter: Using Block Style Format 
An annotated sample cover letter for applying for a tech comm position.
Ray, Deborah S. TECHWR-L (2000). Careers>Resumes>Cover Letters
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Your resume must persuasively answer at least four key questions to win the interview.
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The Art of the Developer Resume
Resumes may seem like something of a mundane topic, but after spending the last few weeks wading through resumes from software developers, it is clear to me that most developers need help with their resumes. This impression is backed up by many past resume reading experiences. While I have come across very few truly awful resumes, the majority of the resumes I have read in the last week have been substandard. Only a few have been what I would call really well done.
Read, Daniel. developer.star (2001). Careers>Resumes>Programming
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Business Correspondence and Resumes
This chapter focus on business correspondence-general format and style for business letters as well as specific types of business letters.
McMurrey, David A. Io.com. Careers>Resumes>Writing>Business Communication
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Career Resources: Writing a Resume
The Career Center: Writing a Resume section contains information that can be helpful when you are preparing to write a resume.
Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Careers>Resumes>TC
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A selection of writing samples for cover letters, CVs and resumes.
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Cover letters can mean the difference between your work being read and being tossed callously into the nearest wastebasket. Writing cover letters makes me feel stupid and small, as though I were begging some faceless entity (read: editor) to acknowledge my pitiful existence.
Van Nooten, Sylvia. Writer's Block (1999). Careers>Resumes>Cover Letters
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The Cover Letter: Door Opener Par Excellence
Although we are allowed to put more into a cover letter than can appear on a magazine cover, the challenge is still to keep it succinct. In fact, writing something that is powerful and yet short is the single most difficult kind of business writing. You already know that although it's easy to go on and on in a company memorandum, saying the same thing in half the space can make your work twice as powerful.
Jensen, David G. Science (2002). Careers>Resumes>Cover Letters
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Drake discusses the three objectives of cover letters to work applications.
Drake, Cheryl S. Intercom (2002). Careers>Resumes>Cover Letters
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CVs for Postdocs Leaving Academia
How do I present my academic experience and background in a way which won't turn employers off? I've found lots of example CVs on the Web, but none that shows how to promote postdocing to the "outside world".
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Resume and CV writing is a huge subject, and thousands of books have been written about it. My goal in this column is to give you a brief refresher on some of the most common concerns that you may have regarding the preparation of your own personal "marketing materials." And please don't be put off by that description. Despite the low regard you may have for sales and marketing, it is exactly this job that a resume or CV needs to do when it arrives at its destination.
Jensen, David G. Science (2000). Careers>Resumes
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This sixty-one slide presentation takes job seekers through a comprehensive interactive workshop about the drafting and desigining of their resume sections, including the contact information, the objective statement, the education section, the experience section, and the honors and activities section.
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Keep it simple and easy to read. Do not overuse bold or italic lettering. When sending via e-mail, remember everyone may not have the same equipment/programs that you do.
Raperto, Marie. IABC (2006). Careers>Resumes
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The Career Center: Writing a Resume Effective Scannable Resumes section contains information that can be helpful when you are preparing to write a resume. It discusses how many companies are using OCR scanning to pick keywords out of a resume and enter them into a database. This section can help you write your resume so it will allow for effective scanning.
Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Careers>Resumes>TC
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First Impressions--Lasting Results 
Your resume is the first sample of your writing that a manager sees. If your resume is fatally flawed, you might not get an interview. Writing a resume involves determining what to emphasize to potential employers; building a convincing case for your qualifications through how you document your education, skills, and experience; and presenting your resume professionally.
Mazza Panagakos, Denise and Cindy Thornton. STC Proceedings (1998). Careers>Resumes
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From an Employer's Wish-List to Your CV
In this column I'll give you my strategy for preparing a CV and point you towards useful resources, but first of all let me assume that you are planning to start your career within the UK job market. CV styles vary across the world.
Science (2003). Careers>Resumes>Regional>United Kingdom
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From Sentence to Bullet: How to Style a One-Page Résumé for Traction
The one-page MBA résumé has become, in graduate management education, the self-representational document of choice. Sentences are out, bullets are in, details remain. The key is how to detail the bullet to describe, define, and deliver, in non-narrative form, professional achievements and accomplishments. In this paper, I examine samples of raw quasi-narrative descriptions and suggest restyled improvements for single-line bullets that more clearly, precisely, and effectively represent how authors describe their achievements. The raw data come from a data set of some 400 résumés submitted as a task in a studio-based broadcast course on business communication. The authors are mid-level managers in Latin America enrolled in a global MBA program. The paper examines the content and form of the objective, summary, and professional experience sections of the résumé and provides a set of tips for written language use in the résumé.
Staczek, John J. Association for Business Communication (2005). Careers>Resumes>Management>Business Communication
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A template for technical writers developing new personal resumes.
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It's your main marketing tool -- and a sink for potentially endless tweaking and anxiety. Here's some advice from our experts on how to put together that all-important résumé/CV (and its frequent traveling companion, the cover letter).
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Writing a bad résumé is easy. Writing a good résumé is hard. It will take time and many drafts. Because research scientists are often targeting several very different career paths simultaneously, it is important to have several different résumés that accent different skills.
Fiske, Peter. Science (1996). Careers>Resumes
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The Ideal Resume: Thorough, But User-Friendly
Smith, a former resume writer for a professional resume-writing franchise, demonstrates ways to improve the usability of resumes.
Smith, Gary M. Intercom (2002). Careers>Resumes
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Industrial-Strength Technical Communication 
In the nineties, if an employer took one glance at your résumé and started to fall in love with you, it probably had a lot to do with your long list of software tool skills. Nowadays, most employers couldn't care less about tools. It's all about industry experience.
Davis, Douglas W. STC (2007). Careers>Resumes>TC
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An integrated approach to teaching résumé construction in the business communication classroom focuses on simultaneously (a) emphasizing writing-related proficiencies and (b) encouraging ethical and moral orientations to this task. This article provides a résumé construction exemplar that operationalizes these two pedagogical goals. The techniques and exercises used in the exemplar are presented as a way to make ethics education accessible for both business communication instructors and students.
Conn, Cynthia E. Business Communication Quarterly (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Education>Resumes
