I Ruin Resumes

Here's one from the department of unintended consequences. Over the past week or so I have spent a lot of time working with students on their resumes. February turns out to be time when most of the theatre community looks for work over the summer. It's been during this stretch that I have noticed that my particular brand of problem solving, while having a net positive effect on production and pedagogy (or at least I hope so) has done a downright disservice to student resume writing.

It goes like this, up until two years ago we were in the traditional production mode that schools tend to be in. Students in my area working on production got to list things like Technical Director, Assistant Technical Director, or Master Carpenter on their resumes. They knew what to write and people reading the documentation understood what they were doing. Then two years ago I had an idea. It was a good idea and centered around people getting to do better projects and maybe work a little less - or at least spend their time more valuably. So we swapped the traditional structure for a commercial scene shop structure. Its been an interesting experience and has provided all kinds of nuances. One of the upshots though has been that the tried and true titles of the past no longer worked in practice and we wound up calling people Project Manager, Job Lead, and Carnegie Scenic Apprentice (if you're not me, if you are me you say Crazy Scheme Apprentice).

Really, I think once you get the conversation I think that these positions are better developmentally anyway - but, they do look odd on a resume. Additionally, depending on the people in the positions, the job responsibilities change significantly and when first seeing them many employers have no idea what we're on about. Oh well. Then I had another idea.

A year ago we had a discussion about how we were arranging freshman crew. At the time, most production students got a run crew and a build crew over the course of the year. Some people got significantly more than that. So when they went to write their resumes they would say run crew, or build crew; maybe focus crew or something like that. Again, straight forward and recognizable. Except that we were having many people that never got an opportunity to have all the experiences while simultaneously having the same people get overloaded with too much work. Enter the resume killing idea specialist again. We revamp the freshman experience: capping weeks, distributing experiences across all the disciplines, and tying the production experience directly to professionally mentored classroom work. Fabulous, seems to do great things, except what was build crew or focus crew now becomes:

Multi-Departmental Stagecraft Internship

and once again once you get to explain it is a wonderful thing, but at first glance nobody has any idea what we're on about.

So with two ostensibly good ideas I have pummeled the resumes of Freshmen, Juniors, Seniors, and all my Grads. This spring we are looking at the sophomore crew experience. At the moment it looks strikingly like Build Crew. My job seeking students can only hope I don't have any good ideas before this gets sent to the Registrar.