Writing Academic Resumes and Cover Letters

Resume writing has nowadays come to become one of the most important job seeking services. As a vital part of your preliminary selection process, resume acts as a letter of introduction that helps your prospective employer to decide whether or not to give you an opportunity to demonstrate your job skills. Thus, your resume can be termed as a clearance document that gets you through the entry level assessment of your entire selection process.

Resumes are always accompanied by a cover letter, also known as a job application letter in certain countries. Cover letter covers the objectives of your resume and the purpose of your interest in a particular post. Cover letters are smaller in size than resume or CV and ideally extend only up to a single page. There are certain exceptional jobs in which cover letters as well as the entire resume runs for pages. This is seen mostly in case of academic, administrative and research jobs. Now these are the kind of jobs that requires detailed profiling of the candidate and his degree of eligibility. Detailed CVs (Curriculum Vitae) are furnished along with a comprehensive cover letter for high level posts in such industries. Cover letters hold special importance in several of these jobs, especially for academics.

The proposed candidates for academic and faculty jobs are examined by several levels of authorities in a college or university and they pass through several hands before they reach the final recruitment department. And most of these authorities only go through the cover letters if the resumes are marked eligible by the previous department that has already sanctioned the applicant’s candidature. They have hundreds of applications to go through, so it is highly probable that they check the resumes of only those applicants who seem fit according to their cover letter standards. Another reason for this practice is that an academic cover letter is expected to be more elaborate than the usual ones used for other jobs.

Academic jobs generally include job of a faculty or teacher, trainer, university level researcher etc. The qualities and qualifications required for each of these jobs are interchangeable or same. It basically calls for more leadership and disciplinary qualities. So, your cover letter should include all the important events in your academic history that highlights you as a perfect candidate for the advertised post. These events include your ranks, honors, awards, special training courses, exceptional merits and scholarships. An academic cover letter can be stretched up to 2 pages. They should be divided into suitable sections and the topic headers should be highlighted in each paragraph. Always refer to a handful of cover letter samples before drafting your final one.

You can also seek help from superiors and professors in your college in this regard. Nothing can benefit you more than their expert opinions drawn out of long years of experience. However, your cover letter should always be smaller than your resume or CV and their objectives should be identical. You can find great academic cover letter samples in various resume writing websites or academic job forums.