Quintessential Careers Press: Surefire Resumes for New Graduates and Other Entry-Level Candidates Chapter 4: Portray your Skills as Transferable and Applicable to Your Post-college Career Page 26 These skills include: Ability to meet deadlines, thrive under deadline pressure: College is a cornucopia of deadlines. If meeting deadlines is an important skill in the job you seek, by all means exploit in your cover letter your ability to do so. Ability to handle multiple tasks: Remember how you wanted to smack all your instructors for requiring simultaneous major papers and projects? Multi-tasking is increasingly valued in the workplace, and your cover letter gives you the chance to boast of your ability to juggle many projects at once. Ability to achieve goals: Your good grades are proof of that skill, so do boast about them if they're exemplary. You may have met other goals while in school, too, such as graduating in three years instead of four (which may be why you don't have any job experience). Any goal you've met while in school is potential cover-letter fodder. Ability to adapt: Your college years probably gave you your first opportunity to make adult decisions and act independently. How did you handle stumbling blocks and disappointments along the way? The way you rose above difficulties can provide solid examples in your cover letter. Writing skills: Jobs that require good writing skills are a lot more common than you probably think they are. If you demonstrated your ability to write well in college, you can highlight that skill in your cover letter. And, of course, your writing talents should be self-evident from the quality of your cover letter as well. Research skills: How many people who've been out in the "real world" have research skills that are as fresh and recent as yours? How many know as much as you do about, say, conducting research on the Internet? Probably not many, so for jobs where this ability may be helpful, be sure to emphasize your research skills. Previous Page Next Page Back to Surefire Resumes for New Graduates and Other Entry-Level Candidates Index Page