On Monday April 20, 2026, Elgin Community College held a Resume Workshop to help both students and those around the community strengthen their resume building techniques.

The event, run by Ron Jones, the Internship Coordinator at ECC, was located in Building F Room 225. It was an informational workshop and presentation on both the importance of a resume, and how to build a better one.

“You need a good resume because that’s how you’re going to market yourself,” Jones said. “A lot of the time the employer isn’t going to see you, they’re going to see your resume first.”

While giving the presentation throughout the workshop, Jones described a resume as a “hook” for an employer, and preached that the cover letter is where you had that page to talk about yourself in more detail.

“I think about it as burger and fries, you can have a resume by itself just like you can have a burger by itself, but the fries or the cover letter in this instance really makes the meal,” Jones said.

Throughout the meeting, Jones emphasized the importance of summarization and quick points, for resume building. Employers often want a resume that they can look through quickly, and that is easy to look through.

After the presentation was over, Jones allowed the last hour of his time to go over some of those attending the workshop resumes. Some of those in attendance had the bloat of their resumes as the biggest lesson that they took away from the meeting.

Others, like two attendees Aimee Padilla and Ron B. learned from the workshop in other ways.

The two who are Buffalo Grove and Algonquin residents, found out about the workshop through ECC’s LinkedIn page.

“I had only gotten jobs through connections all of my life, so this was important to me to learn what it is really like to build a resume, and how to do it right,” he said.

“This really opened my eyes to how much you need to hone in on the details,” Padilla said. “Things like using basic fonts and simple templates are some of the little details that I was missing.”

Jones instructed everyone to use simple fonts and templates, because just like the rest of the resume, it needs to be simple for an employer to read and look at.

Jones thinks that students can really learn from workshops and events like this.

“I wish that when I was in college I had something like this, because I was constantly doing templates trying to find the right way to build a resume and I had no idea how,” Jones said.

Another major point that Jones looked at during the presentation was understanding skills, the types of skills, and what type of skills people have.

He pointed out the difference between hard and soft skills, as well as something that he said is overlooked, transferable skills.

“What you are good at, and what other people tell you, you are good at,” Jones said. “These are your transferable skills. 

Throughout the presentation there were multiple activities that had attendees look at different sets of skills and say how they have used some of those skills in their experiences working.

Jones believes that it’s important for students and everyone to know how to build a good resume, because it is a promotion of yourself.

“Most people are afraid to talk about themselves, this is the opportunity to talk your talk, do not be modest, do not be shy,” Jones said.