Striving for success as a musician depends not only on your talent. Your prowess as a musician will go in vain if you cannot showcase your skills on your resume.
If you cannot deliver your expertise to the recruiter, they may not have any idea about your potential.
Hence, you need to create a music resume that resonates with the recruiter’s expectations and demonstrates your skills.
Here are a few tips to help you craft an impressive resume:
Writing the professional experience section
Outlining this section correctly can completely change the outlook of your resume.
Be it mastering the art of studio composition or teaching aspiring musicians, the professional experience section should show all your accomplishments and contributions. Skillhub’s resume edit service is one of such that can help to display one’s skills on a resume.
Marking as one of the most important and toughest sections to master in a resume, here is how you can compose it:
- Write quantifiable statements: After curating one-liner statements, try to quantify them to create a concrete impact. Let’s say you are working as a music teacher. So it is important to write the number of students you are teaching and how many instruments you are covering.
- Create subheading: For 3-4 relevant points, create subheadings that showcase your contribution and skills. For example, audio engineering & student engagement, etc.
Note: We do not consider these statements as complete sentences, so avoid adding full-stops.
Designate a section for your performances
For a musician, performances are very important. They reflect their abilities to play in front of a crowd, collaborate with artists, and so much more. Similarly, one wishing to know how to become a music producer should also take a look at these tips.
Hence, in a resume, writing this section becomes really important.
So, include a distinct section for your performances to emphasize your accomplishments.
Here are a few examples that can help you master this section:
- Acted as the lead vocalist for the school band and achieved the 1st position in the Semi-tone competition
- Played at Lollapalooza festival, Mexico, in Oct‘ 19 while opening the concert for the band Snow White Patrol
Create a professional summary
In a paragraph of 2-3 lines, this section should reflect your key achievements as a musician.
Let’s say your key expertise lies in the studio where you master as an audio engineer. The recruiter should know this information instantly when looking at your resume.
Further, as the recruiter is most likely to notice your summary first, you need to make sure that such valued skills are present here.
Check out the example below that will help you create an impressive resume summary:
7+ years experienced Music Teacher and Certified Audio Engineer with a prolific record of teaching students from all age backgrounds. Adept at liaising with artists to work on projects and fine-tuning the sound. Skilled in designing easy curriculums to help beginner students.
Demonstrate your skills
Musicians possess a variety of skills, be it mastery over an instrument or working with artists of different genres.
However, when you are writing your resume you need to take into consideration all the aspects of your skillset.
For example:
- Transferable skills: This does not make the cut in any music school’s curriculum. However, when you are required to work with other artists or even teach students. Such skills become important for your profile.
- Music skills: Let’s say you included all the interpersonal skills that make you a dream to work with. But all of this will go in vain if you cannot include your musical strengths. Such skills can range from what instruments you play to your mastery over a genre of music.
Note: Let’s say your target profile is audio engineering. For such profiles, create a technical skills section and include the tools/equipment you are familiar with.
Leveraging the job description
Making an impressive resume is not just about showcasing all your skills and expertise. It is about optimizing your existing resume as per the target profile. Thus, analyzing the job description becomes important.
Let’s say the job description requires the potential candidate to have mastery over the Chicago Blues.
If you possess this expertise, you can make changes in your resume to reflect it.
Follow the same strategy and select a few keywords from the job description and highlight those in your resume.
Such tweaks can help you create a job-specific resume and pass the ATS (a screening software that shortlists resumes based on a set of keywords) too.
Conclusion
To end, your music resume should resonate with the job you are targeting. However, when you are using the job description, do not include skills that you cannot validate. Further, while writing the skills section, avoid soft skills and personality traits as they are not ideal.
