Here at CANADEM, we are always striving to increase the marketability and appeal of our registrants. As part of this effort, we have introduced two major changes to our on-line registrant portal: You can now update your own professional summary and elections profile. Please take a few minutes to read through these guidelines as they contain important information on style, structure, and content.

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Guidelines for Writing Professional Summaries

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A Professional Summary is a short paragraph that provides a snapshot of your work experience. We use them to help our clients get a quick overview of the registrants whose applications we forward. We also search within them for keywords when we do candidate searches. Since they might be the only thing that recruiters read, it’s important that they are succinct but detailed enough to express all the important information about your work history. Generally, they should be written with these rules in mind:

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• Between 80 – 150 words

• Written in an elliptical style (i.e. like a newspaper headlines)

• Written in the “third” person (i.e. don’t use “I”)

• Use abbreviations wherever possible (i.e. always use 12 instead of ‘twelve’, BA instead of Bachelor of Arts)

• Academic credentials are always contained within brackets

• Semi-colons are used to separate work experiences

• Sentence fragments are permitted to increase brevity as long as they don’t undermine general coherence and readability

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Every professional summary should contain the following components in this order

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• An occupational title or titles (i.e. lawyer, police officer, policy adviser etc.)

• Academic credentials (i.e. MA International Affairs, BA)

• Current experience

• International experience

• Domestic experience

• Important miscellaneous information (i.e. electoral observation missions, unique volunteer work, etc.)

 

Here are some examples

Civil engineer (MSc Engineering, BSc) with extensive international experience, especially in Africa; has worked as consultant for the last ten years advising on the construction of water and sanitation infrastructure to governments, NGOs, and firms (Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Sierra Leone, in Honduras, Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Africa); previously held progressively responsible positions with private construction company in Britain (1985-2000).

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Governance Expert (LLM Humanitarian Law, LLB, BA) with 30 years of experience in the areas of parliamentary reform, election technical assistance, and evaluation; career highlights include: team leader for an evaluation mission regarding the assistance provided by the Association of Canadian Parliamentarians the government of Uganda (2001); designed and delivered courses on political party development for Afghan public officials (2003); played lead role in organizing first Afghan elections, including establishment of polling stations and information campaign.

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International Development Expert (Ph. D. Anthropology, MA Political Economy, BA) with rich theoretical understanding of gender and development; has consulted extensively in Venezuela  and Pakistan where she conducted research on gender, identity, and development issues for IGOs (OCHA), high-profile NGOs (Oxfam, GOAL), private firms, and doctoral studies (2005-2010); has been with Brookings Institute since 2001 in progressively responsible positions: currently Senior Program Specialist overseeing projects for Middle East and South Asia, previously Team Leader for Peacebuilding in Reconstruction Program, and Senior Gender Specialist; has done gender and security training for American Refugee Committee and was adjunct professor of development studies at Johns Hopkins University (1999-2002).