L LANCER CAREER PREP
Workplace Prep

Your first resume

You have more to put on a resume than you think. This page shows you how to find it and how to write it so an employer takes it seriously.

Start here: you are not too young to have a resume

Almost every student says the same thing first — "I've never had a real job, so I have nothing to write." That's not what a resume measures. An employer hiring a sixteen-year-old already knows you haven't run a company. What they're checking is whether you show up, whether you finish things, and whether you can be trusted around customers and equipment. You have evidence of all three.

School counts

  • Classes tied to the job — accounting, anatomy, CAD, media production
  • GPA, if it's 3.0 or higher
  • Awards, honour roll, academic teams
  • Big projects you can describe in a sentence

Activities count

  • Sports — especially multi-year, or captain
  • Clubs, ASB, drama, band, robotics
  • Church and service work
  • Anything where you led, organised, or trained someone

Unpaid work counts

  • Babysitting, tutoring, pet-sitting, yard work
  • Helping in a family business
  • Volunteering, mission trips, camp counselling
  • Freelance work — photos, video, art commissions, coding

Write bullets that show a result

This is the single change that separates a strong student resume from a weak one. A weak bullet names the job. A strong bullet names what changed because you were there. Aim for a number in at least half of your bullets — how many people, how many hours, how much money, how much faster.

Too vague

Babysitter — Watched kids after school.

Volunteer — Helped at church events.

Team member — Played on the soccer team.

Specific, with a result

Babysitter — Cared for three children ages 4–9 for 12 hours a week over two years; managed dinner, homework and bedtime routines unsupervised.

Volunteer, VBS — Led a group of 15 first-graders for a week-long program; trained two new volunteers on the daily schedule.

Varsity Soccer — Four-year player, team captain senior year; organised weekly captain's practices for a 22-player roster.

Notice that nothing in the right-hand column is a bigger accomplishment than the left. It's the same babysitting job. The difference is that the reader can now picture it, and can tell you were reliable over a long stretch.

Start your bullets with one of these

Open every bullet with a verb, not with "Responsible for" or "Duties included." Past jobs use past tense; a job you hold right now uses present tense.

How to lay it out

One page. Always one page, at this stage. Sections in this order, and leave out any section you genuinely have nothing for.

The order

  • Name and contact — name, phone, email, city. No full street address, no photo, no birthdate.
  • Education — Orange Lutheran High School, expected graduation month and year, GPA if 3.0+.
  • Experience — paid and unpaid together, most recent first.
  • Activities and leadership — sports, clubs, service.
  • Skills — software, languages, certifications, equipment.

Formatting rules

  • One page, margins no smaller than 0.5 inch
  • One font throughout, 10–12pt body text
  • Bold your job titles so they scan quickly
  • Consistent dates — pick Jun 2025 or June 2025 and never mix
  • No tables, columns, text boxes or graphics — they confuse the software employers use to read resumes
  • Export as PDF, named Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf

About that email address. Use your school email or a plain personal one built from your name. An address you picked in sixth grade is the most common unforced error on a student resume, and a hiring manager sees it before they read a single word you wrote.

Before you submit — the checklist

Work down this list with your actual draft open. Most students fix three or four things on a first pass.

  • It fits on one page with no orphaned line hanging onto a second page.
  • My name is the largest text on the page.
  • My email is professional and my phone number is correct — I have checked the digits.
  • Every bullet starts with a verb, not "Responsible for."
  • At least half my bullets contain a number.
  • Verb tense is consistent — past for finished, present for current.
  • Dates are formatted identically everywhere.
  • No spelling or grammar errors. I read it aloud, and I read it backwards from the last bullet up, which is how you catch what spellcheck misses.
  • Someone else has read it — a parent, a classmate, or me.
  • It is saved as a PDF with my name in the filename.
  • Nothing on it is untrue or exaggerated. Everything survives being asked about in an interview.
Brightspace assignment

Resume, revised with AI coaching

You will use an AI assistant as a critic, not as a writer. It never writes a bullet for you. It tells you where your writing is vague, you decide what to do about it, and the log below records that thinking. The log is what you turn in.

Before you start. Use only an AI tool your teacher has approved. Most AI assistants require you to be at least 13, and if you are under 18 they expect you to have a parent or guardian's permission — check with them first. Never paste your phone number, address, email or another student's name into any AI tool.

  1. Draft your resume first, on your own

    Use everything above this section. AI cannot tell you what you did last summer — finding your own content is the actual work, and skipping it produces a resume that isn't yours.

  2. Take your personal details out before you paste anything

    Delete your phone number, street address, email and the names of any other students. Replace them with [PHONE], [ADDRESS], [EMAIL]. The AI only needs your bullet points to give useful feedback, and you should be in the habit of never handing personal details to a website that doesn't need them.

  3. Run this exact prompt

    Copy it, paste it into the AI tool, then paste three to five of your bullets underneath it.

    Resume coaching prompt 
    You are a career coach helping a high school student with their first resume.

Do NOT rewrite my bullet points. I need to learn to do this myself.

For each bullet I give you, respond with exactly three things:
1. Could a stranger picture what I actually did? Yes or no, and why.
2. What is missing - a number, a result, a timeframe, or who benefited?
3. One question you would ask me that would make this bullet more specific.

Be direct about what is weak. I would rather hear it from you than from
an employer. Do not be encouraging for the sake of it.

Here are my bullets:

  4. Revise at least three bullets — and reject at least one suggestion

    Rejecting advice is part of the assignment, not a loophole. The AI does not know your life. If it suggests a number you don't actually have, or a claim you couldn't defend in an interview, turning it down is the correct answer and you get credit for explaining why.

  5. Fill in the log below and generate your report

    Every box needs an answer. The report gets a verification code that changes if the file is edited afterwards.

  6. Submit both files to Brightspace

    Your revised resume as a PDF, and the report file this page gives you. Two files, one submission.

Revision 1

Revision 2

Revision 3

Name one specific thing the AI told you to do that you decided against. Explain your reasoning. "I agreed with everything" is not an acceptable answer — look harder.

Due date and rubric

The due date, point value and rubric for this assignment live in Brightspace. If anything there conflicts with this page, Brightspace wins.

Then take it into an interview

Your resume and your interview answers should tell the same story. Once your draft is done, run a mock interview and use the bullets you just wrote as your examples — that's the fastest way to find out which ones you can actually talk about.

Start a mock interview