Ouachita Stories

Ouachita Baptist University Career Services will host an online resume workshop Wednesday, Nov. 20. The workshop is open to all students and will be in the Ouachita Commons Alumni Room from noon to 12:45 p.m. Tiffany Eurich, instructor of communications, is the featured speaker.

The online resume workshop was first offered last spring. Lauren Land, director of career services, said it was so well received that she invited Eurich to lead one again this fall.

Eurich encourages students to participate in the workshop because online resumes are “a low time investment for a great return on investment.”

Eurich teaches an online media course that includes building personal websites, which made her an ideal candidate to lead this crash course. “I realized there were some basic tenets in that class that would benefit the student body as whole, that you could apply to your work no matter what major you had,” she said.

Eurich will use this hour to not only explain the value of online resumes and why they’re important, but will primarily focus on the basic techniques of building a website. Her goal is for the students is to take those techniques and, over a weekend, be able to build a finished, working, published website.

“Paper is one dimensional, so we’re looking at the kinds of things you’ve done and training you to rethink the way that you promote yourself and your skill set, and helping you to rethink the kinds of things to put in a resume that are going to work online,” Eurich explained.

“In a competitive market, you have to have a very strategic approach to the job search,” Land noted. “You have to be able to give a good overview of your skill set and experience but you should also take advantage of every opportunity to show them what you are able to do.”

Land said her goal for workshops like this is to make sure the students have the tools to know how to prepare themselves when seeking jobs. “I want students to walk away with the basic understanding of why a career-oriented personal website is relevant and how they can actually build one,” she said.

“I want to get my students on the leading edge of the trend and continue to work as technology develops to keep them on that leading edge as they’re entering the work place,” Eurich added.

“The Internet makes everything an even, level playing field,” she said. “You can go in and create a polished website that can leverage that power of the Internet to showcase what you, individually, are capable of.”

Eurich emphasized that having only paper resumes are quickly becoming a thing of the past. An online resume is more than just transferring what you have on paper to the Internet, she added. It provides individuals the opportunity to “creatively use the Internet to showcase yourself in the best possible configuration.”

To learn more about the workshop, contact Lauren Land at [email protected] or (870) 245-5593. Interested in other events hosted by Ouachita Career Services? Follow @OBUCareer on Twitter or Ouachita Career Services on LinkedIn, Facebook and Pinterest.

By Molly Anne Turner