Career wise, your resume is one of the most important documents you’ll ever produce. Are you giving yours the regular attention it needs? Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out, a great resume can often mean the difference between the dreaded ‘keep’ and ‘toss’ piles on a recruiters desk.

Knowing how to structure your resume, what to include, and how to make yourself stand out from the crowd are all essential skills for any job seeker. Personally, I like to use the following format:

1. Header: Who are you and how can the recruiter get a hold of you.
2. Objective: What are you trying to accomplish in the near term (in one sentence).
3. Experience: Start with the most recent first, and customize your highlights for each role.
4. Education: List any awards, scholarships, and any courses you’ve taken (in addition to any degrees).
5. Interests / Accomplishments: Shed a little bit of yourself outside work (clubs, associations, hobbies, ran a marathon, won business challenge etc.)

I’ve been lucky enough to lead hiring for several roles so i’ve seen my fair share of resume formats, and the above is one that I always find the easiest to follow. Customizing your resume for every job is a must, but it can be hard to keep track of all those versions. Luckily some online tools have cropped up over the past few years that help you build, track, and share your resume.

Two tools I think are great are Emurse.com and JobSpice.com.

Emurse.com is great if you are looking for any easy to use solution for creating, advertising, and tracking traffic to your resume. Resumes posted on Emurse get great SEO rankings, an especially good thing as most people will Google your name anyways. You can choose your own custom domain name, and there are a variety of download options for your resume (check out a sample here).

JobSpice.com does much the same thing, but I like this one as well because it is so visually easy to use. You can start organizing the content in your resume right on their homepage, and then assign a wide variety of skins later to suit the content. You can also define multiple blocks and show and hide them as needed (great when you need to customize each resume).

A third and also excellent option is Google Docs. I like Google Docs because I can work locally, and sync my changes later when I’m connected to the web. They also have a great set of resume templates to start out with.

If your resume only exists on your local computer, it’s time to get it in ‘the cloud’. Any one of the above services are a great medium for doing that.

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The hype in the online community has been building for the last year about Apples latest creation, a super-secret tablet device they were working on. Today they revealed this new product, the “iPad”.

In my opinion this isn’t exactly the same kind of home run Apple has hit with their last few launches. The product development plan probably went something like this: “Guys the iPod touch and iPhones are a huge hit. Stay with me here, what if, just what if we took the iPod touch, and made everything 3x larger.”

The Macbook Air pictured below was met with the same kind of fanfare when it was released, but how many people do you know that actually went out and bought one?

Do you think the iPad is going to go the same route as the Macbook Air?

For me there’s a few things a tablet computer can’t ever live up to:

• A physical keyboard
• A lid that keeps the device protected when closed/traveling
• A hinged display that is freestanding and can be adjusted

Now you could make the argument that it is not meant to replace a laptop or netbook, but it wouldn’t replace an ebook reader for me either. An e-Ink display without a back-light like on the Amazon kindle makes reading on an electronic device bearable.

There are options that include 3G wireless access at a cost of $29.99 unlimited data access (in the US), but if you’re going to be doing some serious work, you’d probably use a laptop anyways.

What do you think?

Here’s Hitlers thoughts:

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