Helping Students Create Professional Resumes

With built-in guidance and tips, Xello’s resume-builder helps middle and high school students of all abilities create a stand-out resume.

Writing a resume can be an intimidating and time-consuming process at any age – but even more so for students in middle and high school that may be attempting a resume for the first time and struggling to figure out where to start, what to include, and why it matters.
Understanding how to showcase one’s skills and abilities is a learning process in itself – one that helps pave the path for a student’s future success by helping them secure internships, college scholarships, summer jobs, and post-secondary opportunities. That’s why encouraging students to start early and guiding them through the resume-writing process is essential.
Recognizing the long-term benefits of building these employability skills early on, several states and school districts have incorporated resume creation into mandates and graduation requirements – ensuring that all students graduating high school carry with them the essential skills required to succeed in the real world.

A guided resume building experience to support students of all abilities

With Xello’s new Resume Builder, your students can begin developing their resume-writing skills as early as middle school. Unlike the basic resume templates you’ll find in a google search, Xello’s Resume Builder is interactive, mobile-friendly, and offers students guidance throughout the process to help them understand the basics – like what a resume is, how it’s used, and how to approach your resume if you don’t have any work experience.
This guided approach creates a welcoming and engaging experience for all students – no matter what their starting point is. And with a handy tooltip that introduces students to their on-screen Help section on first visit, you can rest assured students will know exactly where to go to get help if they get stuck.

Students can spend less time formatting and more time developing meaningful content

Students don’t have to start from scratch. Xello’s resume builder makes it easy to take the valuable information students have learned about themselves through assessments, self-reflection, and early experiences, and turn it into a professional resume.
As students click into the different sections of their resume, they’ll notice that Xello automatically pulls in any relevant work they’ve already completed in their ‘About Me’ portfolio – including saved skills, interests, work experiences, and volunteer experiences. Students simply click the checkbox next to a saved entry to add it directly to their resume. No copying and pasting required.
And when students edit saved entries or add new content to their resume, it’s automatically synced back to the About Me profile so students don’t have to make updates in two places.

Within each section of the resume, students have access to Tips & Samples that help guide them in do’s and don’ts of writing a stand-out resume and provide writing samples to inspire new ideas and help students quality check their content.

At any point, students can use the Layout options to customize their resume by removing sections that aren’t relevant, or readjusting the order so they can put their strongest skills and experiences first. Students can also hide the default icons that appear next to each section of the resume for a more professional look.

Once students have added content to each section and customized their resume to suit their needs, they can download it as a fully formatted, professional PDF, or as an RTF file – allowing them to add custom sections or style their resume their own way.
Students can make updates to their resume at any time. A ‘last updated’ date displays on the Resume tile on students’ About Me page to help them keep track. And if you’d like students to store multiple versions of a resume in Xello, students can simply download and save resume files to their Storyboard before making fresh updates.

Educators can easily review student resumes and track completion

Educators can easily access and review individual students’ resumes from within the Overview tab of the student profile. The new Resume section will contain a link to a PDF of the student’s resume, and display a last modified date to show evidence of the student’s progress.

To encourage students to create a resume and track its completion, simply set-up a custom lesson for the relevant grade(s) and set the resume builder as a prerequisite.
The lesson will appear on students’ dashboards and once clicked, students will be prompted to create their resume. Once students complete the mandatory sections of the resume, they can return to the lesson to add a reflection in response to your instructions, and turn the lesson in.

You can monitor completion using your lesson progress reports. Use the completion status dropdown to identify students that are falling behind and then click the Send Message button to send a follow-up message reminding them about the upcoming deadline.
If you’d like to track resume completion for a custom group of students rather than an entire grade, you can use Assignments. For example, if a resume is one of the requirements that students must meet in order to participate in your work-based learning program, you can create a student group containing all WBL applicants and assign that group a resume assignment with the Resume Builder set as the prerequisite. Then simply add new WBL applicants to your custom group to have the assignment automatically appear on their dashboard and track its completion using your assignments reports.

Ready to take the new Resume Builder for a spin?

You can explore the new Resume Builder using your student demo account. Simply navigate to the About Me page, scroll down and click on the new Resume tile.
To learn more about this exciting new feature and how to incorporate it into your lesson plans, check out our resources in Xello Support.