Day 1: Resume Building That Works

1. Apply for internships.

2. Take jobs that practice team management, scheduling, or project management skills —even if it’s outside the industry.

3. Do volunteer work (see volunteering events here.)

4. Take courses that are related to pipeline knowledge or production management.

5. Connect with industry professionals on LinkedIn.

For emerging talent (≤ 2/3 years of experience in a Production role), yes.

Most productions (aka projects) can run between half a year to 2/3 years, so even after getting your first gig, there may not be a lot to beef up your resume if you’re only sticking to industry related experiences.

For this reason, it’s worth taking a look at your past experiences, even if they’re outside VFX/animation, to see if there are transferable skills in your past that can help you in a production role today.

As you gain more experience in the industry, you can phase them out.

To an extent, yes. Note the department you were in and mention that this gives you a deeper understanding of the pipeline, but do not write too much about artist-focused tasks.

If applying for a Production role, I am much more interested in skills/experiences that are closer to the responsibilities assigned to Prod than what you did as an artist. So, be sure to read the job description to pick up on what is relevant to you and the role you’re applying for.

You can, but it has very little impact, so I generally don’t.

Awards and scores may not mean the same way or may not mean anything at all depending on who’s looking at it. My advice is that that real estate is better spent on a more thought out details for your profile, experience, or skills.

That’s great! Congratulations on starting a new adventure!

If you’ve been working at the same company for a while, chances are your job title or role would have changed throughout the years too.

You don’t have to lump it all in one just because it’s under one employer. This may get messy, hard to read, and confusing. Each hat you wore had responsibilities of their own, so highlight that.

You can break up your experience per job title and emphasize the key contributions you did when you were in that role.

PROD TIP: Play around with formatting so you’re not having to repeat the company name over and over —avoid clutter!

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Yes, but you don’t have to start from scratch all the time. You can optimize this by being familiar with your own resume and switch up keywords to match it closer to the role’s job description while still making sense and without needing to overly rewrite.

The choice is up to you.

But what I can give advice on is that if you choose to use AI, do spend time to read and edit for accuracy and personalization.

Also ensure that there is congruency between what’s on your resume, cover letter, LinkedIn profile, and what you say in an interview.

Applicant Tracking System

A type of software that studios use to manage job applications through its ability to scan, filter, and rank resumes based on specific words.

This is why formatting and writing relevant content are especially important as some resumes will not reach “human eyes” at all if certain keywords are not met through search or filters. To be fair, recruiters also receive hundreds of applications everyday and it’s also not “humanly” possible to read each one in a timely manner.

While it may be boring to look at, text-only and simple font/format are what work best with ATS. Images, tables, fancy fonts and colors do not. But what helps the most are keywords that match the job description of the role you’re applying for.

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“..[a] simple test is CTRL-A, CTRL-C then CTRL-V into a… text editor. If the text mixes text and breaks up sentences, it is not ATS "readable." - Reddit

Use at your own risk.

Be careful not to affect resume text parsing. It’s safest and more reliable to keep it clean: no graphics, no complex design, no columns, no colour.

While creativity and “looking nice” can make it memorable for a human reader, if it’s poor in ATS, it may not even reach any human reader at all.

PDF is the way.

Docs are unreliable and may break/change the formatting and font depending on the software used —you can’t guarantee that everyone in the hiring team has access to MS Word.

PDF on the other hand, preserves your desired formatting.

Ideally 1 page, but not always.
Remember that the goal is readability.

If you have a lot of relevant experience and condensing it all into 1 page makes it difficult to read, then that defeats the goal. 2 pages is acceptable.

If you’re expanding to seem like you’ve had a lot of experience, you’re repeating details, absurdly formatting gaps/font sizes to fill the space, embellishing or adding things that are NOT relevant to the role, stick to 1.

Personally, I do not expect anyone who has had less than 2-3 years of experience in a Production role to need more than 1 page.