You probably have a good resume that you have used to apply for internships, scholarships, and jobs. The important thing about resumes is that you must vigilantly keep them up to date. It’s ideal to have a current resume on hand and ready to send out when that dream job has an opening.

In addition to adding current accomplishments to your resume, be sure to keep your Skills section up to date. Why? The skills section is The Resume Section That Matters More Than You’d Think. It translates the things that you can do into the language of your field, making what you know how to do relevant for the positions you apply for. You may want to tweak the skills section for every job you apply for in order to echo information from the job posting and what you know about the company or organization.

So how do you write a great Skills section? You can begin with the Muse article The Resume Section That Matters More Than You’d Think, which outlines three steps to follow as you polish your resume. Next, watch How to Showcase the Skills an Employer Wants (3m11s) from the Lynda.com course Writing a Resume Layout, which addresses how to make your experience relevant to the workplace.

Finally, you might check out the Lynda.com course Designing a Resume, which demonstrates how to use design features to create a resume that is modern, traditional, or artistic. Finally, if you’re a military veteran preparing to enter the civilian workforce, find tips in the Lynda.com video The resume and cover letter from the course Translating Your Military Skills to Civilian Workplace.

Photo Credit: Application – pen2 by Flazingo Photos on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA license.

In the workplace, you will find that a lot of your daily writing is some kind of correspondence (letters, memos, or email messages). This week’s #TuesdayTutorial focuses on one of these kinds of correspondence: letters.

Most of the time, the letters you write will be formal letters. You will use letters for things such as job applications, official requests to someone inside or outside your organization, documentation of complaints and reprimands, and recognition of special achievements. Here are some more specific examples that you are likely to see early in your career:

• cover letters that are part of a job application packet.
• thank you letters to those who are part of your job search (e.g., interviewers, HR staff, those who write recommendations).
• recommendation letters for those you work with.
• cover letters (or transmittal letters) that accompany reports and proposals.

In all these cases, you will want a formal letter. You may occasionally write informal letters in the workplace, but it’s typical for informal correspondence to be handled in email messages.

To learn more about formal letters, watch this short video from Rasmussen College to find out “How to Write a Formal Letter” (3m49s):

This week you are writing an internal progress report. It’s similar to the kind of progress report that you might give to your manager or co-workers to let them know what’s happening with a project.

You also need to know about how to write external progress reports, which will go to clients or stakeholders outside your organization. While the general purpose is the same as that for an internal progess report, the audience is quite different.

The Lynda.com video Using in-progress reports to communicate with clients (4m 23s) will walk you through the key features and the important characteristics of this kind of progress report.

We’re using Slack for informal and real-time discussion. You’re already signed up on Slack, so in today’s post, I want to give you some how-to’s that will help you get the most out of the tool.

Connecting with Your Writing Group

Slack may provide the fastest way to connect with your group members, because the tool can send a notification directly to your cell phone. Here’s how to make that happen:

1. Download and install try the mobile app, which is available for iOS and Android. There is a beta for Windows Phone.
2. Join the channel for your writing group. I have invited you to the groups, and I set the channels to private.
3. Tag whoever you want to notify:
   1. To connect with a particular person, use @ + username. For instance, to tag me, you’d type @tengrrl.
   2. To connect with the entire writing group, use @channel.

That’s it. When you tag someone, you trigger notifications in Slack. If your group members have the mobile app installed, it will ping their phones.

Using Emoji

Emoji work pretty much as they do in any other app. Either click the smiley button at the end of the input field and choose your emoji from the pop-up box, OR if you know what you want, type it, such as :poodle: (My family has poodles, so :poodle: is my favorite.)

Using Search

At this point in the term, you probably have little use for the search tool. There’s not much in Slack yet. Later in the term, when you are working on your final, you may want to know how many messages you posted in Slack. At that point, these search modifiers will help:

• From: – a specific user
• To: – a specific user
• In:- a channel, group, or direct message
• After: – a specific date
• Before: – a specific date
• On: – a specific date
• During: – during a specific month or year
• Has: – a star or a link

Here’s how it works: In the search box, type the modifier, followed by a colon, and then the related information. For instance, if you wanted to see all the messages I sent, you’d type this: from:tengrrl

Other Slack Tutorials

If you want to learn even more about Slack, try the Slack Guides on the Slack website.