Technical Skills and Keywords for Resumes

When submitting a resume, you want to make sure that your technical skills are clearly displayed. You want to do this for two reasons:

1. To reassure the employer that you won’t need remedial training in a technique they are interested in
2. To allow systems that use scanned resumes to pick up keywords so that your resume will be selected for further examination.

How will you know what skills are important?
You will need to study job announcements while you are in school to keep informed of hot trends and techniques. For bioscience and chemistry majors, you can find a great list of skills at the Royal Chemical Society's Skill Center.

For Example:
If you are a molecular biology or microbiology student, some sample skills and keywords you might want to highlight are:
DNA & RNA purification
cDNA library construction/screening
DNA & RNA hybridization
PCR
Cloning
Sequencing
PCR amplification
Northern & Southern blot analysis
Thin layer chromatography (TLC)
Plasmid DNA procedures
Bacterial genetics

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