Sally Redux

Different times and happy days

Britishbees

Thanks Bob! It is for a volunteer position but with the local Fire Department as part of the Crisis Response Team and on the application it requests education, High School Grade 1 to 4 and College Grade 1 to 4. This has me totally baffled as to what to indicate and what the grade should be . I completed school and college but my qualifications were CSE's and O'Level. When they list degree here it seems to mean something totally different!!!!

Mrs H the S

Married2abrit

Britishebees:

The High School grade 1-4 is asking how many years of high school you completed (for the American school system, I know the UK is different). Circling the 4 would show that you graduated high school. The same for college 1-4, 4 would mean you completed your college degree, whereas 1 would mean that you have 1 year of college education. HTH!

Britishbees

Thanks so much for the explanation Married2abrit. Now I get it

Mrs H the S

SATX John

Also, check online for FEMA courses, they will help on a resume in this area. You can knock out a couple a week to pad the resume. They also count toward Unversity level credits.

http://training.fema.gov/is/crslist.asp?page=all

Britishbees

Thanks for that. I will have a look.

Steerpike

Haven't read every response yet, but here's my 2c (to stop the resume from ending up in the TRASH (see below ... )...

Make sure you change the default page setting of the document from 'A4' to 'letter'; if you leave it set for 'A4" you'll typically cause the printer at the other end to stall waiting for manual feed - not something you want to cause in a busy HR department! When you do this, you will find the page breaks change, so if you are carefully controlling the layout, re-check it.

Use US spellings and US vocabulary; a resume is not the place to assert that the US versions are 'wrong'. Resumes are often rejected due to spelling mistakes, and 'colour' would be considered a mistake in this context.

Don't include 'UK specific' content - eg, don't say 'clean drivers license', or 'single', etc. Don't put in 'hobbies', etc.

When possible, keep it to 2 pages. When reviewing resumes, I often stop reading after 2-3 pages - learning to summarize and condense information is part of the challenge.

Create a 'word' version and a 'PDF' version. If you create a 'text only' version, as needed by some online job sites, try to submit the word and PDF versions in addition. When presented with a pile of 20 'text only' resumes to review, I glaze over after a few pages and give up.

Setanta

The only real difference is that, if you completed your secondary level education (O and/or A levels) before the mid-to-late 1980s in Northern Ireland, then you would have been marked harder. The examining board for the AEB (Associated English) were much more lenient, for example.

Northern Ireland has more or less consistently out-performed the rest of the country in this respect.

The Scottish do 'Highers', so I'm not sure about running a direct comparison tbh.

GCSEs are basically an amalgamation between the harder O Levels (General Certificate of Education) and the easier CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) examinations, making the GCSEs easier but with the advantages (and disadvantages for some) of continuous assessment.

The GCSEs basically levelled the playing field a bit and brought English and Welsh standards up, and dropped Northern Irish standards!

But there is no difference regionally, apart from Scotland.

SultanOfSwing

I did my GCSEs in '95 and my A-Levels in '97 so I guess I'm not as smart as I thought I was

Actually, my A-level chemistry was done through the AEB; as was GCSE History, I believe. The course material seemed on a par with the stuff I did through NICCEA, though (was that the name, I can't remember ...)

My main point was that there may have been a difference between how different schools on the mainland handled sixth forms, compared to how mine did.

Setanta

You may be smart, but we're talking about examinations here!

Being good at passing exams doesn't, in my opinion, necessarily mean you are smart... and vice-versa. It's only a rough guide, really: if you're good at passing exams (with high grades), the chances are you're reasonably intelligent.

.. and then there's specialist knowledge.

I'm not sure that A Levels changed much in all that time though.


I think sixth form is standard throughout. Sixth and upper sixth. There might be slight differences per school though.

(Again, apart from Scotland)

SultanOfSwing

Aye. I found the A-levels to be pretty easy but I didn't put a lot of work into them - I could have come out with a couple of As if I had (my chemistry teacher did inform me I missed an A by a single mark ...)

We had Lower and Upper Sixth. Ahh, great days

ScouseLaa

How have you expressed your degree? For example we have 1st, 2.1, 2.2 etc. They have GPA?

Nutmegger

I don't think the grade point average refers to the actual degree, it's just a meter of how things are going during the year that determines if a student is good enough for an honors program. I believe that many colleges in the US use the Latin honors system for degrees, cum laude, magna cum laude, summa cum laude, etc.