Julie is a PhD in Public Health student who contacted Career Services for help with updating her resume.  Julie had a very fulfilling Federal job and wanted to grow within her organization.  Therefore, she decided to take a proactive approach and use her resume as a tool to market her skills, achievements, and education to her current employer. 

 Julie sought assistance with her resume because she felt it did not capture her achievements in the last few years both at her job and in her academic career. During her career services appointment, we worked on updating her Education section, added action verbs to describe her accomplishments, quantified her achievements, focused on results, and took off unrelated and outdated experience to tailor her resume toward internal Public Health research and data analysis positions.

 After polishing and updating her resume, Julie presented it to her supervisor.  Her new resume helped illustrate that Julie could be considered for a higher pay grade and have more responsibilities within her expanded role.  Julie says that her promotion was based on her work performance as well as putting her achievements down on paper to reinforce and illustrate further skills and experience she had to offer.

 Other factors that contributed to Julie’s promotion included her “actively seeking different projects to lead” and involvement in two research projects outside of her current job.  She also developed a good working relationship with her supervisor and applied the academic knowledge she gained through her Walden program toward advancing her research skills.  She attended Career Services sessions at residencies and will contact Career Services again after she graduates from her PhD program.  Julie plans to continue building and tracking her qualifications to further enhance her career.

Julie’s success is a great example of how proactive career management and a quality resume can help promote career advancement.  She has now moved from “an entry level science job” into a position where she will be able to train other researchers and write reports that may lead to publications.  As part of her new role, she has already presented a poster session at an Alzheimer’s conference in Vienna. We wish her luck in her new pursuits!

 Written by Dina Bergren, Career Services Advisor. 

If you have a success story to share, please email us at:  careerservices@waldenu.edu.