Executive:

Your resume needs to communicate more than just your work history, job duties, and even key results of your efforts.  At the executive level, authorities want to know more than just "what" you did; they want to know "how" and "why" so they can better assess your fit within the organization and its goals.  Executive resumes tend to be longer (two or three pages is the norm), a bit more detailed, and emphasize strategic contributions.  Everything in the resume should support a specific career target.  The entire document should present  a sharp, focused, cohesive picture of who you are and why you're valuable.

1.  Start with a summary.  Begin with an overview of your strongest selling points.  Make sure this summary clearly indicates the type and level of position you're interested in, and be certain to include highlights of your career contributions.

2.  Show your chronological work history.  You are best served by a traditional reverse-chronological format introduced by a powerful summary.  Even if you're trying to downplay some less-than-stellar recent experience in your work history, be certain to show job titles, employers and dates of employment.

3.  Write your responsibilities.  Your resume should be more about what you did than the duties of the job itself.  Briefly describe your scope of responsibility, highlight your achievements and contributions--things you did that improved revenue, profitability, productivity, customer satisfaction or contributed to other business objectives.  You should be more focused on strategic contributions than day-to-day administrative duties:  Communicate the "big picture" in your resume.  Resume readers are pretty intelligent.  They can make assumptions based on job titles and general descriptions; they don't need to have every task spelled out for them.

4.  Be specific.  Avoid vague qualifiers such as "substantially" and "significantly.  Use hard numbers to lend credibility to your accomplishment statements.

5.  Describe accomplishments.  Your accomplishments will have more impact if presented in context or in relation to a specific challenge.

6.  Be consise.  It's important to use a tight writing style so that you can communicate important information without losing your reader in a sea of text.  Edit, edit, edit, to remove information that isn't essential to your message.

7.  Format increases impact.  Use type enhancements, bullets and indentations to make your information easy to absorb.  Above all else, make sure you don't make spelling, punctuation or grammatical errors.

Professional:

1.  Attractive layout.  Use bold and italics to highlight key points.  Get creative but not crazy.  You can use a little touch of color if your are modest.

2.  Justify the text.  This will make your resume easy to follow.

3.  Font.  Times New Roman, Arial, and Verdana are some of the best fonts for a resume.  Do not use cutesy graphics.  It is NOT appropriate for business correspondence.

4.  Do not use the "I" in your resume.  Start each sentence with a powerful verb.

5.  Proper cover letter for each position.  Do not ever send out a resume without a cover letter.  This is basic business etiquette.  Personalize each cover letter directly to the position to which you are applying.

6.  Edit your resume.  Use the grammar and spell check function, but don't rely on it.

7.  Degree: List only the year that you obtained your degree.  List your dates of attendance.

8.  Format Consistency.  For example, don't list one date as 1/2004 and then list another date as 9/22/2004.  List software consistently.

9.  Pay attention to punctuation and capitalization.

Time, energy, thought and care spent on resume development is an excellent investment in yourself and your career.  Your resume is important.  If it's powerful and focused, it can help advance your career.

Good Luck!