Purpose

This first assignment will ask you to think and write about your past jobs and work experiences. We will use parts of this assignment as the building blocks for your more formal job application materials. The goals of this assignment are three-fold:

Allow you to review your past work experience to prepare you to use that experience as evidence of your competence and skill when applying for a new position.
Prepare you to move from writing about yourself and your past in comfortable and familiar writing genres (narrative) to less familiar ones (job materials).
Give you a space to get comfortable with the writing process and vocabulary we will be using in this course.

Task

For this introductory assignment, you will write a professional skills narrative of 600-800 words that describes how you did your last job. What skills were necessary, and how did you apply them? Where did you develop/learn those skills? (Remember that when the prompt says “job,” it uses that word expansively to mean any past work or volunteer experiences—paid or unpaid.)

Your narrative should focus on one concrete moment in your work experience. A list of all of your work will come later in the résumé. Here, the goal is to explain one past work experience in great detail. We’ll be using this writing as the building block of your job materials in later assignments, so including detail is key.

Because you will be using this draft as pre-writing for your job materials, you are the primary audience for this essay. Instead of focusing on impressing or compelling your audience’s attention (the goal of many narratives), focus your energy on including as much detail in the narrative as possible about your work.

Finally, you will use your narrative to compose an author’s memo of 200-250 words.