r e s u m a k e r s !

A new book by Susan Jacoby, called The Age of American Unreason, talks about the growing trend of ignorance among Americans. Nicholas Kristof, writing for the New York Times, said of the book on March 30,

“’America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism,’… [but Jacoby's] broader point is that we as a nation will have difficulty making crucial decisions if we don’t have an intellectual climate that fosters an informed and reasoned debate.”

Kristof’s article, “With a Few More Brains…”, goes on to lament the effect that such ignorance may have had on American policies, politics, and international relations. Whether or not his claim on the political repercussions of Americans’ purported ignorance is true, Jacoby’s book does make a striking argument on the state of our brains and our intelligence. Sure, one could argue about the intellectual progress of Americans either way: “Look how far we’ve come!” or “Oh my gosh, we’ve regressed so far…”, but what may be even more important are the lessons we can take away from Jacoby’s position: 1) we must always learn from our history, and 2) revise, revise, revise!

We must always learn from our history
Writing a resume is about knowing who you are, what your history is, and therefore, where it is you want to go from there. If Jacoby and Kristof are right that the United States is deteriorating in intelligence, then ideally all we would need to do to get back on track is take a look at our history.

Resumes, especially chronological ones, literally give an employer a snapshot of your work history: they know where you’ve worked, when, for how long, and they kinds of things you did there. If you do a poor job, all you see is the skeleton, with little to accentuate the accomplishments you’ve made over the years. Worse, if you actually have a patchy or a non-existent work history, a resume can be just the tool to show you–and employers–what you need to change.

Luckily, we don’t acquire all of our skills only from work, and resumes can be arranged to reflect that. (Contact Alison for more information). Still, developing a good resume is an excellent place to start in career strategizing–it forces you to see where you’ve been, and helps you to plan for getting where you want to go.

Revise, revise, revise
The hope, of course, in reviewing your work (or other) history, would be to learn what it is you need to revise about yourself! Perhaps if we Americans had been conscious about where we were coming from intellectually, we would have ended up in a better place, and Jacoby wouldn’t have been able to write her book. …of course, life itself rarely turns out the way we plan.

But we have control over our resumes, and making revisions and enforcing constant updates are imperative! You can choose, for example, what it is you want to show on a resume, which skills you want to emphasize, and what jobs you want to downplay. A professional can help you do those things in a responsible and savvy way.

Perhaps Ms. Jacoby would be disappointed to see an response to her book that is utterly devoid of politics. Yet we can take from her a message that is practical and useful to politics, left or right, as well as to our professional and personal lives: we must approach life consciously, constantly considering our history, and revising accordingly.