WORK ON YOUR MBA APPLICATION RESUME LAST
Work on your MBA application resume last — within the last two or three weeks before the school deadline. Why? There are going to be things that you work on that come up at work, all recent updates you will need to capture and include in your resume. The resume is more or less a living document, a document that is constantly updated. Cue all of those updates. Know what you’re going to say in your MBA application essays, know what your boss’ are going to say in your letters of recommendation and then manage your MBA application resume according to that. Meaning, make sure everything is consistent. And make sure it’s consistent with your online information too, for example on your LinkedIn profile.
Your MBA application resume should only be one page
Your MBA application resume should only be one page. The rule of thumb is if you have less than ten years of work experience, you should only have one page. That’s what Wharton's Career Management Centre along with a number of other MBA programs say. If you think your resume should be two pages long, you’re wrong. You’re either too technical, too wordy, or you’re not using appropriate space on your resume. Maybe you’re using up too much white space? This is an exercise of being concise, this is like a cheat sheet for the admissions committee. Get it to one page because two pages tells the admissions committee you didn’t spend enough time focussing on what is really important. It also tells the admissions committee you didn’t spend enough time on your resume. There’s no reason for a two-pager.
Every bullet point should be leadership orientated
Every bullet point on your MBA application resume should be leadership orientated. There are all sorts of acronyms for how to structure these bullet points but always start off each one with a leadership action orientated verb. Such as “spearheaded," “lead," “managed,” “supervised,” “drove,” “impacted.”
Don’t just describe what you do at work, nobody wants to read that. The admissions committee knows what a consultant does at Bain or BCG. They want to know what you specifically worked on, who the clients were, who you had to deal with (from the client), who you had to deliver to, why it was so difficult and what was the eventual impact. Don’t only give them the bottom line, but include if there were any cultural changes, or greater opportunities that were afforded to those who wouldn’t usually have had them. They want to know all that in one bullet point.
Resumes can be difficult because you have to be concise and try to get all that information into one bullet point. A one line bullet point can have three sentence fragments in it, so it is possible. Sometimes you’ll end up poking your eyes out trying to make things fit on a page given all the requirements, but it can be done. That’s why you probably need a consultant.
Write your MBA application resume in a b-school format
Your MBA application resume has to be in a b-school format. What does that mean? Look up “resume book Wharton MBA” or any other school that you’re applying to for an example. You do not change your resume format per school because that is akin to rearranging deck chairs on the titanic and it does you no good. Pick a b-school format you like, they’re all kind of the similar, and run with it. Pick the one that maximizes the amount of information you can put on there. Don’t pick ones that have the gratuitous use of white space along the sides. Keep it all black and white. Google resume book, or career center resume guidance (Berkeley), career center resume pdf Wharton or Harvard. Find something online that you like and go from there.
The most recent experience comes first
On these MBA resume examples, you’ll always see, if it's from a business school, that they always put the education first. Don’t put the education first. The reason why education is first in these specific MBA resume examples, is because that person is still in b-school. So, the most recent experience comes first. Therefore, their education would come first because they’re still at Wharton or Harvard. Therefore, you should put your work experience first.
There should only be three sections
On your MBA application resume, there should only be three sections apart from your name at the top. First section: Work Experience. Second section: Education. You would put your undergraduate and your graduate degrees here. If however, you received an online certificate at an Harvard extension program, or some training course in Microsoft - that does not go in the education section. That goes in the last section: Additional. Here you can talk about your additional leadership experiences outside of the office but also your additional training. The reason you don’t put that Harvard extension in the education section is because it’s not on par with an undergraduate or even a graduate degree. Don’t do that, it looks weak.
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