My book, Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers, is on Amazon. We had a few problems with the initial setup of the book, but the publisher did a great job getting everything fixed. You can now buy the book on Amazon:
This book is perfect for anyone in an operations careers, whether production, quality, logistics, transportation, maintenance, scheduling or engineering. There are tons of examples, often showing both the typical resume content/formatting and then an improved version. In addition, I show the resume writing process from start to finish. I used a hypothetical Production Manager for my example. It took six chapters to show how to write this example resume, with detailed instructions showing each improvement along the way. There’s also a resume assessment checklist that you can use to review your resume. It gives specific criteria and best practices for the assessment so you can look at your resume like a resume writing pro.
Amazon also has the Look Inside feature active, allowing you to check out the Table of Contents, first chapter and index.
We had a slight problem with the storefront selling the book. We’re working on resolving it. Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers will be available within the next few days.
If you have any questions about the availability, email us at [email protected].
The book can be purchased directly from the publisher, and in the next few days, it will be available on Amazon. I am also working on getting the book into other retail channels.
My new book is just about ready to go. I’m due to receive the first printed copy today! The book, Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers, teaches the resume writing process in a step-by-step approach. It starts with the information a job seeker needs to know in order to develop a good resume. It then shows the resume writing process in great detail for a hypothetical job seeker. Finally, the book answers many of the questions job seekers have – questions about how to deal with unusual aspects of their careers.
The book will be available on Amazon on or before September 1st. We’re also selling the book through some other retail outlets. I’m working on the website to provide additional information on the book (www.resume-writing-for-manufacturing-careers.com). I’ve added one page so far, but will follow.
Below is a copy of the cover…
Resume Writing for Manufacturing Careers - Front Cover
On Monday, I’m doing a webinar with APICS reviewing different online resources for job seekers. The focus will be on how to make your job search more effective. APICS is an organization dedicated to operations management. I’ve been a member for around 15 years and am currently President of the Blue Ridge Chapter. If you are a manufacturing, distribution or supply chain professional, you should check out APICS. It can be a great benefit to your career. If you are a member already, check out the APICS Career Center for information on the webinar.
I reviewed a resume from a production supervisor today with an introduction that immediately caught my attention. When I was a recruiter, I worked on a few positions where this job seeker would have been like gold. Despite this, the writing of the introduction was actually horrible, even though it was extremely effective.
It may seem odd that the intro section was both horrible and effective. The goal of a resume, after all, is to land an interview. You aren’t trying to create a Pulitzer Prize winning document. Despite this, job seekers should try to make their resume easy to read, clear, concise and well thought out, and this resume did not meet these goals.
There is one reason why this resume was effective. It led off with a skill set that is typically in demand. The skill set the job seeker led off was bilingual production supervision. In many parts of the country, finding experienced production supervisors and managers who are fluent in both English and Spanish is difficult. I’ve been in production facilities where more than 90% of the work force speaks Spanish as their first language. In fact, early in my career, I spent a year managing a production team with recent immigrants who could barely speak English. They were extremely hard working and productive, but I struggled to communicate effectively with them. I learned how important it is to have bilingual supervisors in a production facility. Later, as a recruiter, I again saw this importance from my clients who needed to hire bilingual supervisors.
A strong bilingual manufacturing professional can be difficult to find. For this reason, some recruiters will be ready to pick up the phone to call this candidate as soon they read the first line of the resume. Because of this, the job seeker produced an effective resume. Unfortunately, the job seeker misses an opportunity to write a resume that will be effective in other situations.
Most manufacturing facilities do not require a bilingual candidate. If a hiring manager is looking for a strong supervisor, they are going to focus on the leadership skills, experience and accomplishments of the candidate. This is where the resume fails. After the first line, the job seeker has a very long paragraph listing a large number of skills… a total of 27 skills over the next fifteen lines. Most of the skills are the standard run of the mill type, for example, communications skills, experience with Word and Excel, leadership, problem solving and cost reduction initiative. This will do little to impression a hiring manager. Anyone can put these phrases on their resume, and doing so doesn’t make a candidate better than another candidate. You need to have more substance.
A much better approach would be to lead with one or two short sentences, highlighting the most valuable skills and then listing a few accomplishments demonstrating the experience with the skills. The skills that should be listed first are the ones that are most in demand. For this candidate, bilingual and 15 years of production supervision should be right at the start. Buried in the resume, this candidate discussed how he was a part of Six Sigma project saving $250k annually in scrap reduction, and how the candidate was close to receiving his Black Belt. This is another significant experience that should be at the top of the resume, not buried at bottom of the first page.
The key is to emphasize a few skills and accomplishments that will motivate a hiring manager to pick up the phone and call you. You may have one skill, like being bilingual, that will help in a lot of situation, but you should have more than that. A one trick pony will be excluded from most positions that don’t require that one skill. Pick the three or four most significant skills in your background (and that are in demand) and sell those at the top of your resume. Then, move the list of every skill under the sun to the bottom of your resume. This can serve as a good keyword list so your resume shows up when hiring managers do database searches.
Experienced professionals often struggle with deciding how many of their jobs to list and how much detail to provide for each. This can be a tough decision. On a two page resume, you won’t have enough room to write in detail about everything.
Experienced professionals often struggle with deciding how many of their jobs to list and how much detail to provide for each. This can be a tough decision. On a two page resume, you won’t have enough room to write in detail about everything.
You should provide at least the last ten years in detail. Hiring managers will be much more interested in your recent experience, so you want to prioritize this. You can summarize your experience further back if you don’t go into detail. For example, you could include a line like:
Progressed from entry level production supervision to materials management, including roles as production controller and logistics manager.
This line would take the reader from the start of your career up to the place on the resume where the detail starts, a materials management position. In this example, the progression is fairly typically, starting in production and shifting over to materials through a serious of positions. Most materials professionals will recognize this career path and won’t need additional information.
If you have been with a single company for more than 10 years, you should show the entire progression with them. Stability with a single company is a very positive sign on a resume. It shows the person was successful through the progression of promotions. List the full progression, since it demonstrates a strong pattern of success. For positions a long time ago, you can summarize the experience by listing the jobs, for example:
Logistics Manager December 1992 to July 2000
Production Controller August 1988 to December 1992
Shipping Supervisor March 1985 to August 1988
Production Supervisor June 1980 to March 1985
This shows the progression without any detail, just the titles and dates. From this point forward, the resume would show the detail of the materials management experience. You could even consolidate the summary further:
Held production supervision, production control and logistics management positions from June 1980 to July 2000.
This is a short summary providing enough information for a hiring manager to understand how you got to the materials role.
Job seekers who return to school in the middle of their careers have a different challenge. Getting a degree can transform a career, allowing a person to switch paths completely. In this case, the experience prior to completing the degree may be irrelevant. For example, consider a person who worked in hourly production roles and completed an IT degree. The person upon graduation takes a job as a network administrator and moves along an IT career path from that point forward. In this case, there’s little benefit to the experience prior to completing the degree, and it can probably be omitted, especially if it is more than ten years ago.
For older workers, there is a lot of concern about age discrimination. Listing every job back to start of a career will help ensure hiring managers know exactly how old you are. There’s no reason to highlight this. List the last 15 to 20 years, giving significant detail to the last 10.
The main reason you want to omit or summarize your experience from more than 10 years ago is it allows you to focus on the last 10 years in much greater detail. Your recent accomplishments are your biggest selling points, and you want to focus on them.
One of the greatest job search challenges people struggle with is identifying a wide range of substantive accomplishments to include on their resume. Accomplishments show what you did. Part of the difficulty lies in how companies measure performance.
One of the greatest job search challenges people struggle with is identifying a wide range of substantive accomplishments to include on their resume. Accomplishments show what you did. Part of the difficulty lies in how companies measure performance.
Every company uses metrics to measure performance. Some companies have comprehensive metric tracking, while others use only a few measures. In either case, the metrics show the performance of an aspect of the company. With a well designed metric system, improving the individual measures will improve the bottom line of the company.
For many people, showing how they directly improved a company’s bottom line can be difficult or impossible. This is where the metrics help. You can show how you improved key areas of the company that are recognized to be drivers of the organization’s success.
For example, in the NFL, how could you assess the performance of a running back? This is made difficult by the variance in the quality of the teams and the different offensive strategies used around the league. Although a running back can have a significant effect on the success of a team, he cannot win alone. So how would you decide who is successful and who isn’t? Football, like all sports, has a number of metrics used to judge a player’s performance. For a running back, this could be yards/game, yards/carry, total yards in a season, touchdowns scored, fumbles and a host of other stats. These metrics measure individual performance and help differentiate runners.
In your career, you should identify the key metrics for your job and track them. Typically, these will be a part of your performance evaluations. Some companies publish their metrics on a regular basis so employees know how the organization is performing. This makes it easier. If your company doesn’t do this, you may have to do a little more work, but you can still show you performance.
There are a tremendous number of metrics. The Supply Chain Council has a benchmarking program with over 400 metrics to choose from. The Performance Management Group is a consulting firm that helps companies improve their metrics. They list 95 metrics they routinely use with clients. For example, PMG lists seven metrics for order fulfillment lead times:
Customer Signature/Authorization to Order Receipt
Order Receipt to Order Entry Complete
Order Entry Complete to Start Manufacture
Start Manufacture to Order Complete Manufacture
Order Complete Manufacture to Customer Receipt of Order
Customer Receipt of Order to Installation Complete
Total Order Fulfillment Lead Time
If you are involved in order fulfillment in any way, you should have had an impact at least a few of these metrics. Show what you did and the effect it had on your resume. This will demonstrate your potential by showing you specific work performance.
As you review metrics and include them in your resume, you need give the reader a clear understanding of the magnitude of the impact. Going back to the NFL, a running back might talk about yards gained in a season. One running back might talk about gaining 1000 yards last season. For people unfamiliar with the NFL, this is meaningless stat. You need some context for the metric to know what it means. Adding one key piece of information, that only 16 players gained 1000 yards in the NFL last year, turns this metric into something significant.
On your resume, it is unlikely you can benchmark your performance against league stats. What you can do is benchmark yourself based on historic performance levels and the goals of the company. For example, if you work in manufacturing, you may want to highlight a fulfillment measure such as Start Manufacture to Order Complete Manufacture. You can show your performance level, perhaps three days. To make this stand out, you need to show what you did and the significance of the measure. For example:
Developed a cellular manufacturing station, a pull production system and a dedicated value stream for the highest volume product class, leading to reduced inventory and shorter manufacturing lead times, including a reduction in the Start Manufacturing to Order Complete Manufacture measure from 6 days to 3 days.
An accomplishment like this shows what the job seeker did and the tangible results they delivered. This type of bullet on a resume will help differentiate the job seeker from other manufacturing professionals. To really get the biggest impact out of this, the job seeker should put an accomplishment like this near the top of the resume. For example, the resume might start like this:
Experienced manufacturing manager with a track record of implementing process improvements and delivering cost savings.
Lean Manufacturing: Developed a cellular manufacturing station, a pull production system and a dedicated value stream for the highest volume product class, leading to reduced inventory and shorter manufacturing lead times, including a reduction in the Start Manufacturing to Order Complete Manufacture measure from 6 days to 3 days.
This presentation will be a good attention getter. On a real resume, I would have a slightly longer summary description before the bullet and would add a couple more bullets with other accomplishments.
Take a look at the metrics used in your company and the metrics common to your industry. These can help you identify the key areas of your company that you impacted. Recognizing the areas where you have had a significant impact is the critical first step.
Demand forecasting is the activity in a company that predicts the level of demand customers will have for a company’s products. This activity usually garners very little attention from outside the company. For most job seekers, demand forecasting is far from their thoughts, and yet, a close look into the metrics of demand forecasting uncovers an important lesson for resume writing and interviewing.
Demand forecasting is the activity in a company that predicts the level of demand customers will have for a company’s products. This activity usually garners very little attention from outside the company. For most job seekers, demand forecasting is far from their thoughts, and yet, a close look into the metrics of demand forecasting uncovers an important lesson for resume writing and interviewing.
Companies are supposed to make what customers want. The challenge is significantly greater than most realize. As we move towards the holiday season, manufacturers and retailers have established their forecasts, and products are moving through the supply chain. Lead times for many products are several months, especially if a product is a big holiday seller. Invariably, we will have a story about the “hot toy” this year that catches all the retailers off guard. They will have far less inventory than they need and manufacturers won’t be able to respond fast enough. By the time we know what is hot; it will be too late to respond by making more.
Although missing sales on one hot product can be a major mistake for a company, consistent demand forecast errors can be even more crippling. Making too much of one product is costly as the inventory sits, or worse, has to be discounted to move. Missing sales on a wide range of products by under forecasting demand will mean lost sales, and in some cases, the loss of major customers.
This was the discussion in one of the sessions I attended at the APICS conference last week. The speaker showed techniques he had used to improve demand forecasting.
Improving demand forecasting can be a significant driver of profitability for a company. Forecasting errors produce waste and lost sales. Any improvement will improve sales and reduce waste. To measure the effectiveness of a company’s demand forecasting, several key performance indicators (KPI) can be used. A few of the KPI’s mentioned were:
MAPE – Mean Absolute Percent Error
ONIF – On Time In Full
SLOB – Slow Moving and Obsolete Inventory
Each of these KPI’s is critical to a business. There are lots of metrics companies can use to measure performance. KPI’s are the critical metrics that do the best job of capturing the performance of the business, and if improved, will drive overall improvement in the overall business.
For individuals in roles developing demand forecasts or contributing to the demand forecast, changes which improve the KPIs can be significant. They are the type of accomplishments that should be highlighted in a resume and discussed in an interview.
Most people, if they include accomplishments, list very general accomplishments and only focus on cost savings. Cutting costs is critical to a business’s long term success, but it is only one element of performance. Discussing other KPIs that drive performance can also make a strong impression on a resume. Discussing the accomplishments in detail, where it is clear what you have accomplished and how you did it, can help set you apart from your peers.
If you are the manager of production planning or demand forecasting, focusing on these measures makes a lot of sense. There are others in the organization who influence forecasting accuracy. The sales department needs to give quality customer forecasts to the planners, otherwise, the planners will be guessing. Marketing needs to provide the planners with their plans for major promotions. The speaker told a great story to illustrate this:
A major car company had forecasted a product mix with a lot of green cars. Manufacturing produced the cars and the new model was rolled out and shipped to dealers. The cars painted green sold below other colors, leading to high inventories. Marketing and sales quickly heard from the dealerships and responded with a large promotion to discount the green cars. Sales went through the roof and the inventory was cleaned out. At the same time, demand planners saw the increasing sales of the green car, but knew nothing of the special promotion. They responded by ramping up production to keep up with demand, flooding the supply chain with even more green cars.
This is an obvious mistake, but it is far from uncommon. Communication within companies can be challenging. If you are in sales or marketing, changing your communications with the planning department can make a significant improvement in the business and affect measures such as MAPE and OTIF. If you have implemented a change like this, you should mention it on your resume. Not only does it show an example of a contribution you have made, it shows a broader understanding of how your role can drive performance of the company.
Bottom Line: Look beyond simple cost savings and revenue generation metrics to show how you impacted the overall performance of an organization. Use the metrics that are true key performance indicators to demonstrate your performance.
As a job seeker, there are hundreds of skills, experiences and accomplishments you can discuss on your resume. Sustainability and environmental initiatives are just one category of priorities you can highlight. So, should you market yourself on the cutting edge of sustainable business practices?
“Going Green,” sustainability and environmentally friendly initiatives continue to gain momentum and are increasingly becoming key priorities for companies. This trend is far from universal. As with every other priority companies face, environmental factors weigh differently from company to company. This was made clear at the APICS Conference in Toronto this week.
The theme of the conference was Global Ability, and sustainability in manufacturing and supply chain roles was a key topic. I had the chance to sit in on several of the educational sessions for sustainable issues. Although many companies are grappling with how to integrate sustainability concerns into their business, several companies showed how they are delivering significant tangible results. Reducing the environmental impact of the business is not a goal at these firms. It is an absolute requirement. Even more important, these companies showed significant improvement.
As a job seeker, there are hundreds of skills, experiences and accomplishments you can discuss on your resume. Sustainability and environmental initiatives are just one category of priorities you can highlight. So, should you market yourself on the cutting edge of sustainable business practices?
Unfortunately, there is no right answer to this question. When you write a resume and market your background, you are trying to align your sales pitch to the priorities of the hiring manager. This is difficult.
There are a couple reasons you may want to highlight your experience with sustainability on your resume. First, job seekers with significant skill and experience with designing and implementing sustainable improvements should show this experience. Hiring managers wanting to improve the sustainability of an organization will value this past experience. Second, job seekers without a lot of experience with sustainability may also benefit from a focus on this area. For many companies, sustainability is still new. Showing an interest and some experience in this area will help demonstrate a closer alignment of your values and interests with those of the company. This by itself won’t get you hired, but may improve your odds.
The biggest challenge is knowing whether to emphasize your environmental experience. If you emphasize this experience, you will have to de-emphasize something else. If sustainability is only a minor concern for a hiring manager, and you decide to emphasize this over a key priority of the hiring manager, you will hurt your chances.
There is only one solution to this dilemma. You need to research the opportunity. Reading the job description is not sufficient. Many job descriptions include standard boilerplate text, listing all of the priorities of the company and the position. Most job descriptions will not be tailored to the specific situation. In fact, the same job description may be used company-wide over a period of many years. Despite this, the demands and requirements of different departments, locations and hiring managers will dictate who is hired. These priorities can vary wildly, while still falling under the broad guidelines of the position.
The research you need to do starts with the company. What are the key priorities of the company? What are they actually doing? It’s easy to write a mission statement with a bunch of goals, but what are the activities to back this up. Companies committed to sustainability as a key priority will show how they are achieving sustainable goals throughout their organization.
Other companies are just starting on the sustainable path. They may have little in the way of tangible results, but consider sustainability a key priority. Additionally, every area of a company will not have the same priorities. New initiatives have to start somewhere and spread through an organization. If the hiring manager is on the cutting edge, their priorities may be different from the company in general.
The more you can drill down on the goals specific to the role you are pursing, the better you will be able to tailor your sales pitch. One technique is to network with current and former employees. If you can find people who have experience working within the organization you are pursuing, you greatly improve your odds.
