How to work through the course, and the 90-minute first pass

This course produces a document, not notes. Reading it without rewriting your resume is close to useless, so the structure below is built around a build loop.

There are two ways through. If you have a few weeks, follow the full loop: draft, cut, drill, tailor. If you have an application due tomorrow, skip to the 90-minute first pass at the end of this lesson and come back to the loop later.

The build loop

1. Read Sections 2 through 5. These cover why the resume matters, who reads it, the mechanical rules, and how to structure the content.
2. Draft a master resume. After Section 5, write the longest honest version of your resume. Do not worry about length yet. Include everything you might want.
3. Read Sections 6 and 7, then cut. Section 6 (Standing Out) is about standing out; Section 7 (Common Mistakes) is the failure catalogue. Together they tell you what to remove.
4. Run the Section 9 exercises. Six drills with checkable outputs. This is where the document actually improves.
5. Tailor per application. Tailoring to a job description, in Section 6, has a 30-minute procedure for adapting the master resume to a specific job. You will run this many times.

The master-resume idea is the important one. You are not writing one resume. You are writing a source document you cut down differently for each application.

What to do with Sections 10 through 14

These are useful, not urgent.

• Section 10 (Beyond the Resume) covers everything else in your application: LinkedIn, GitHub, cover letters, referral requests.
• Sections 11 and 12 cover templates. Read them if you are building your resume from scratch or your current one looks dated.
• Section 13 (Resume Improvement Examples) is five before-and-after rewrites. Read it after you have drafted, not before — it is much more useful as calibration than as instruction.
• Section 14 (Advice for Hiring Managers on Screening) is written for hiring managers. Read it because understanding the scoring sheet is the fastest way to write for it.

The 90-minute first pass

If you have an application due tomorrow, do not work through this course. Do this instead. It borrows the most important step from each part of the loop and leaves the rest for later.

Minutes 0–20: fix the mechanics. Read Section 4 (Tech Resume Basics). One page unless you have more than about ten years of experience. Reverse chronological order. PDF, named firstname-lastname-resume.pdf. Contact block with name, one email, one phone, city, and one or two links. Ten- or eleven-point body text with real margins. No photo, no skill rating bars, no tables, no text boxes.

Minutes 20–50: fix the bullets. Read the lesson on the impact-first bullet in Section 5. Then rewrite the bullets under your two most recent roles so each one leads with the outcome rather than the activity.

Before: Responsible for maintaining the payment integration service.

After: Cut payment failure rate from 4% to 0.6% by adding retry-with-backoff and an idempotency layer to the checkout service.

You will not manage every bullet. Do the top four. Those are the ones that get read.

Minutes 50–70: cut. Read the list of common mistakes in Section 7 and delete what matches. Buzzword lines. Skill rating bars. Roles from more than ten years ago that no longer say anything. Anything you could not talk about for five minutes if asked.

Minutes 70–85: tailor. Open the job description. Find its top five requirements. Make sure each one you genuinely meet appears somewhere in the top half of your resume, in the words the job description used.

Minutes 85–90: the six-second test. Hand it to someone for six seconds. Ask them what role you want, what level you are, and one thing you did. If they cannot answer all three, your top third is not doing its job.