This online course has a career counselor walk you through optimizing your resume for any industry — and it's free to enroll now through December 31

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• "How to Write a Resume" helps you create or update your resume strategically for any industry, with best practices and advice on current trends as well as common pitfalls.
• The course is led by a SUNY career counselor and includes a segment with an employer who discusses how they approach a stack of resumes.
• It's part of the 100 courses Coursera has made free to enroll in now through December 31, and you can complete it in as few as three hours.

If you're looking to optimize your next career move, you'd be wise to start with a strong resume.

How to Write a Resume is an online course taught by SUNY career counselor and recruiter Holly Justice that walks you through how to create the cornerstone of your job search. This document is what markets you to prospective employers, and as something you'll submit over and over again, it's important that yours is polished to the best version it can be.

In this course, you'll either revise a current resume or create one from scratch with the help of an insider's strategy and feedback from your peers. The whole thing can be completed in around three hours, and from now until December 31, it's $0 as part of Coursera's 100 free online courses.

While the course is designed mostly for college students or young professionals who are writing a resume for the first time, it's a useful peek behind the curtain for anyone hoping to gain meaningful guidance.

In the course, Justice presents resume best practices as well as pitfalls to avoid, and explores some current resume trends from the perspective of a professional career counselor and recruiter.

You'll get an introduction to the purpose of a great resume, a top-to-bottom look at its typical sections, how to extract transferable skills from past experiences, and advice on action statements, maximizing data, and the organization of all this information that presents a strong thesis to recruiters. Students will also hear from an employer about how they approach a stack of resumes.

Of course, resumes vary depending on the industry, but Justice will help you to build a universal framework. In the fourth module, students learn how to determine buzzwords for their industry or a job posting, and how to incorporate them effectively in a resume.

Enroll in How to Write a Resume for free here until December 31