Abstract
This study examines how and why 20 instructors (17 tenure-line and 3 nontenure-line) in introductory service courses enact their pedagogical values and address current concerns (e.g., personal branding, LinkedIn, and applicant tracking systems) when teaching résumés and cover letters. Research methods included a demographics survey, qualitative interviews, and critical discourse analysis of assignment sheets and deidentified student examples. Results provide an opportunity to renegotiate gaps between Business and Professional Communication’s research and pedagogical methods, shifting from overemphasizing formatting and checklists and toward understanding job applications as workplace genre ecologies to encourage deeper learning.
Keywords
Within the Business and Professional Communication (BPC) introductory or service course, the résumé and cover letter represent the main learning objectives that instructors want to teach by the end of the semester: making an argument, organizing and displaying content (Doan, 2020), understanding audience awareness, and so on. The formal elements of résumés and cover letters have remained relatively stable since the 1980s (McDowell, 1987), changing little when transitioning to electronic media (Baker et al., 1998;Hutchinson & Brefka, 1997). However, the social contexts surrounding résumés and cover letters have changed immensely (Randazzo, 2019a); now, students develop their own personal brands (Watson, 2019), network online via LinkedIn (Moore, 2019), and navigate applicant tracking systems (ATS). During the 2010s, several studies considered how instructors have taught within classrooms at their own universities, providing implications about where students find résumé-writing advice (Randazzo, 2016), how to design an effective résumé (Diaz, 2013), and how to engage students with additional writing and research about their future careers (Fillenwarth et al., 2018;Randazzo, 2012).Randazzo (2020)confirms that most scholarship on résumés and cover letters focuses on formal features, easily distilled into a checklist; however, focusing too heavily on checklists of features instead of content may not consider employers’ perspectives about whether to accept or reject a resume. To show students how and why résumés and cover letters operate as interconnected genres, instructors should draw on their pedagogical training and professional development specific to BPC.
Service course instructors’ training, professional development, and working conditions influence their abilities to share BPC’s pedagogical goals and values. Training new instructors is central to any discussion of BPC pedagogy, as graduate students often teach these courses with varying levels of training and use many of their teaching strategies from first-year composition (Doan, 2019). Other instructors teaching the service course may not have terminal degrees in BPC or access to ongoing professional development; a recent survey (Melonçon et al., 2020) found that only 55% of contingent faculty teaching the BPC service course identified as BPC scholars (Melonçon, personal communication, December 18, 2020). As of 2011, 87% of service courses were being taught by nontenure-track faculty (Melonçon & England, 2011) with high course loads each semester. Budget cuts and the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic have further weakened job security, wages, and working conditions for contingent faculty over the past decade. These working conditions and difficulty in translating BPC research for different institutional contexts contribute in part to BPC’s ongoing “gap between pedagogical ideas or philosophies and classroom practice” (Warnock et al., 2017, p. 155).
This gap between BPC’s pedagogical goals and classroom application (Warnock, et al., 2017), reflects my experiences as a beginning business communication instructor in 2016 and 2017. While research-driven primers on teaching common genres would have been helpful, I also needed more empirical research highlighting BPC’s pedagogical values and showing how to translate those values into my own teaching practices. Although I relied on business communication textbooks like many other novice instructors (Doan, 2019;Wolfe, 2009), I found that textbooks often presented these genres to students as checklists rather than asworkplace genre ecologies, coordinated texts that emphasize the phronesis, or practical wisdom, of a workplace or organization. In my recent work about instructors’ pedagogical goals for the service course, I extend Spinuzzi’s definition of a genre ecology as a set of interdependent genres of communication that work together to translate expertise, allowing a user to accomplish a task within the appropriate context. My definition differs fromSpinuzzi’s (2003)by deemphasizing activity theory to apply this theory as a pedagogical philosophy, “as over-focusing on genre obscures the high-order concerns of the TPC classroom: purposeful content, ethical reasoning, and audience awareness” (Doan, in press, p. 11). This definition goes beyond genre as social action (Miller, 1984) and activity theory (Spinuzzi, 2012) to consider how multiple genres work together and refocuses attention back to writing as a process (Lawrence et al., 2017;Melonçon, 2018), with further attention to each genre’s content (Doan, 2020).
The employment application fits this definition of a workplace genre ecology: to create a compelling application, instructors wanted students to select a specific job advertisement and write employment documents in response (Randazzo, 2020). Next, students tailor their résumés, translating, arranging, and curating their experiences and accomplishments for audiences whom they have not met—or for automated ATS. The cover letter links students’ résumés with job advertisements, adding depth and personality to the list of accomplishments and arguing that the student has something to offer the company. Depending on their learning objectives, instructors may supplement the standard genre ecology of the employment application with an investigative report, a personal reflection about career and writing choices, or a LinkedIn profile. When I was a novice instructor, research like this study would have helped me better teach genre ecologies: teaching how employment genres function as coordinating texts with interdependent meanings, rather than form-based checklists. This article shows how teaching workplace genre ecologies can enact BPC’s pedagogical values in the service course.
In this article, I present results and conclusions from a study of how 20 instructors from 19 universities across the United States taught the résumé and cover letter assignment. I conducted a demographic survey, interviewed instructors about their pedagogical goals, assignment framings, and their feedback processes and comments on students’ deidentified résumés and cover letters. I then completed critical discourse analysis (CDA) of instructors’ assignment sheets for teaching résumés and cover letters. Analyzing these artifacts showed how and why instructors were teaching students to find and read job advertisements, translate their experiences for employers through cover letters, design compelling résumés, and compile professional research or personal reflections. The results illuminate how the employment application assignment teaches central goals and values of BPC, examines connections between the genres within this assignment’s ecology, and shows approaches for engaging students with opportunities for deep learning. I offer the caveat that while 87% of service courses are taught by contingent faculty (Melonçon & England, 2011), 17 of these 20 instructors were employed in tenure-line positions; no data were collected about instructors’ graduate degrees, only about instructors’ pedagogical training. Only 11 of the 20 instructors in this study had taken a graduate-level pedagogy course about teaching BPC. Despite these limitations, this article’s implications show four main values for BPC instructors to enact through their pedagogy: organizing compelling content, using intertextuality to teach workplace genre ecologies, reflecting for metacognition, and legitimizing industry knowledge.
Literature Review
Since my primary aim is to examine pedagogy of the résumé and cover letter, I limit my review of the literature to existing scholarship that focuses on teaching these genres. While these studies have contributed to the field’s understanding of résumés and cover letters, they have been challenging to translate into concrete pedagogical practices because they focus more on these genres than the skills needed to create them effectively (Randazzo, 2016). For résumés and cover letters, BPC textbooks and instructors with less experience tend to show students what to write in their résumés and cover letters, as opposed to how and why to write their résumés and cover letters (Cardon, 2016;Guffey & Loewy, 2018;Rentz & Lentz, 2018). These genre-based rules or advice for résumés should ideally help instructors with little workplace experience teach résumés and cover letters; however, since this research was conducted several decades ago, job-search practices have become digitized (Fillenwarth et al., 2018) and have broader class implications (Randazzo, 2020).
More current approaches assert that even if résumé formats are extremely standardized, understanding the employment application as a genre ecology deepens students’ learning experiences. BPC instructors should use active learning strategies and ensure that the information that students receive is tailored, consistent, and accurate for building their professional identities (Fillenwarth et al., 2018;Randazzo, 2012,2016,2019b). Overly prescriptive approaches to teaching employment documents cause problems for international students, as reasons for localized generic elements—for example, including a photograph and date of birth on Chinese résumés—are often ignored (Li, 2011). Teaching students to value formatting over content also prevents them from deeply understanding any discipline-specific conventions important to specialized fields such as engineering, where strong résumés include disciplinary discourse markers (Fillenwarth et al., 2018). Teaching students how and why their résumé choices matter is more difficult than presenting a checklist to follow; we want students to better understand their own skills and how to market themselves to potential employers (Randazzo, 2012). To write tailored résumés and cover letters, instructors need to think reflectively and reflexively by placing the résumé assignment at a point in the course when students can reflect on their learning, giving students a realistic and complex context in which to write their job documents, and helping students to think abstractly and generally about how their reflections can lead to action (Randazzo 2012, p. 380).Randazzo (2012)further advocates for instructors to use problem-based learning when teaching résumés and cover letters, as this deep approach to learning helps students to remember and transfer their experiences in the classrooms into the writing they will complete in the workplace.
Method
This research is situated within the BPC service course, the introductory course taught as a service to other programs or departments (Melonçon & England, 2011) and enrolled primarily by nonmajor students most likely taking their final writing course (Watson, 2019). BPC research could better interrogate how instructors act as gatekeepers to students’ professional careers through teaching and assessing résumés and cover letters (Fillenwarth et al., 2018). This call for more current research on the résumé and cover letter leads to my research questions:
Answering these research questions gives a small snapshot of BPC as a field. While the genres that we ask students to write are relatively stable, the social context in which we teach has transformed our courses and students’ contexts for obtaining employment, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and economic downturn notwithstanding.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Institutional Review Board approved this study. The next section explains how I recruited instructors and evaluated participation criteria based on a published pilot study of four instructors (Doan, 2019). Next, I describe the demographics survey, qualitative interviews with instructors, and content analysis that I conducted on the résumé and cover letter assignment sheets. Triangulating between the demographics survey, the assignment sheets for résumés and cover letters, and in-depth interviews enabled me to draw insights and recommendations from a sample of 20 instructors across the United States that future research could expand on.
Recruitment and Participation Criteria
To participate in this study, instructors needed at least 3 years of experience teaching postsecondary BPC courses, as I wanted to speak with instructors who had solidified their teaching strategies. Because cover letters and résumés are business communication genres, I included instructors who taught technical communication courses in this study. Instructors taught a résumé and/or cover letter assignment during an introductory service course between Fall 2017 and Spring 2019; two instructors who only taught résumés were included to reflect how a significant minority of instructors teach the employment application assignment. I recruited 20 instructors through professional organization listservs and through social media. Each instructor was compensated with a $50 Amazon.com gift card, funded by the C. R. Anderson Foundation from the Association for Business Communication.
To deepen my understanding of their teaching practices, I conducted an interview with each instructor, including retrospective recall (Still & Koerber, 2010) on their students’ deidentified employment applications. Based on my pilot study’s results (Doan, 2019), I asked questions about instructors’ approaches to teaching the BPC service course, their goals for students’ learning, and what each instructor wanted their students to know or do by the end of the course. I explicitly asked instructors to connect their course goals to how they articulated those goals through syllabi and assignment sheets.
Analyzing Data
Within BPC, CDA, has allowed researchers to analyze discourse while staying attuned to social contexts, such as crisis communication (Dunn & Eble, 2015) and exploring agency and action across communication situations (Darics & Koller, 2019). CDA has the flexibility to be used for analyzing both instructors’ spoken views from the interviews along with their assignment sheets (Lê & Lê, 2009). For this study, CDA allows me to examine instructors’ interviews as discourse within social contexts of higher education in the United States, inferring larger implications about social contexts from what appears in interview transcripts or on assignment sheets (Locke, 2004). To conduct CDA, I systemically read each transcript and assignment sheet, making and categorizing notes about the larger pedagogical contexts.
Participant Profiles
Teaching conditions and institutional contexts from this table situate the next section’s results. The 20 instructors in this study have varying backgrounds, making them a representative sample of those who teach BPC service courses with the protections of tenure, as discussed in the introduction and limitations (seeTable 1). To preserve instructors’ anonymity, I standardized department and course titles, then categorized institutions according to Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education (Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, 2017).
Participant Demographics.
Note: The 20 instructors in this study worked at 19 different institutions across the United States, with 3.5 to 17 years of experience teaching business and professional communication courses.
Instructors taught these service courses between Fall 2017 and Spring 2019, giving a recent snapshot of how the résumé and cover letter is taught across the United States. Five of these instructors taught a shortened summer course, condensing the content and assignments from a 15- or 16-week semester to a summer term between 4- and 7-weeks long. Six of these instructors taught their service course online. Instructors’ disciplinary homes influenced their pedagogical approaches (Doan, 2019; in press): Instructors 1 and 9, both nontenure-track instructors in business departments had no graduate-level coursework in PTC pedagogy. During their interviews, both instructors stated that their overarching goal for students’ learning was to apply theory to business communication genres and research. Instructors who taught in English, writing, or technical communication departments based their overarching course goals on Neoaristotilean rhetoric: teaching students to approach communication through purpose, audience, and context. When analyzing instructors’ feedback on students writing, I found that instructors who had a PhD in BPC and workplace experience outside of academia gave feedback that most closely aligned with their pedagogical goals (Doan, in press). Understanding instructors’ working conditions and instructional contexts gives greater insight into how and why these instructors taught the employment application assignment.
Results and Discussion
This section first examines why instructors teach the employment application assignment, then examines how these instructors teach students about job advertisements, cover letters, résumés, and any additional employment documents, such as a professional report or a personal reflection.
Why Instructors Taught Résumés and Cover Letters
These instructors taught the job application assignment for four key reasons: first, to help students find a job or internship; second, to increase resistant students’ engagement with writing in the service course; third, to improve students’ genre awareness; and fourth, to teach students to shape their writing and content choices to align with their purposes, audiences, and contexts.
Finding a Job
Instructors from business departments tended to have the most instrumental views of how this assignment helped students find jobs, even though instructors employed in English, writing, and language departments valued the job application assignment’s pragmatism. Instructors noted students’ economic and existential anxieties about leveraging postsecondary experiences into “specific, practical results” (Instructor 1). Some departments increased this assignment’s stakes; if Instructor 1’s students wrote a “compelling, persuasive” résumé and cover letter, their résumés were compiled into an official book given to employers at their college’s recruiting fair. Close collaboration with the career center also worked well for some instructors; Instructor 9, also from a business department, had their career center guide students’ résumé revisions to better manage her workload and assist rural students in finding employment.
Winning Students Over
Sixty percent of these instructors taught the job application assignment as the first or second assignment of the semester, wanting to “win students over” to the service course (Instructor 12). Instructors wanted students to understand the value of the service course as a supplement to their major courses: Students were often “resistant to the idea of writing as a valuable part of their major coursework . . . [the job application assignment] give[s] them a really immediately applicable something they recognize” (Instructor 12). Conversely, Instructors 7 and 10 taught the job application assignment as capstone assignments, scaffolding previous units into the résumé assignment. This worked well in Instructor 10’s 7-week summer course; however, Instructor 7 encountered resistance in her full-semester course, as students wanted to finish their final assignments quickly. Still the résumé and cover letter assignment can build students’ appreciation for the courses’ material while improving their genre awareness.
Improving Genre Awareness
Teaching the job application assignment increases students’ genre awareness by showing them the purpose and organizational strategies of effective professional documents. One goal of the résumé and cover letter assignment is to “persuade someone to hire you” (Instructor 15) by using the typical features of a résumé and cover letter, then personalizing them to present a candidate’s strengths and experiences. This approach layers genre formatting (i.e., the look of a cover letter and its features on the page) with genre as social action (i.e., what students want to accomplish through writing a résumé and cover letter;Miller, 1984). This project-based learning, where students create documents that meet the needs of real situations, gives students practice for the types of genres that they will need to write after graduation. Teaching students to understand genres went beyond rote memorization or form letters; Instructor 12 wanted to engage students’ “meta-analytic skills to understand how genres work, how to recognize them, and how to replicate them so that [you] can learn new genres on your own.” The service course facilitates writing real documents for real audiences, making professional genres and types of problem solving real for students. The résumé and cover letter assignment helps students “start realizing that they are writing for people who are not their professors or made up people and then suddenly all the stakes change” (Instructor 4). Teaching the job application assignment gave students experience with employment genres in a low-stakes environment so they could apply their new knowledge and skills in future high-stakes environments.
Shaping Writing and Content Choices
Instructors’ fourth motivation for teaching the employment application in the service course was to teach students to make active writing and content choices within workplace genre ecologies. When students enter the service course, many are unaware how their writing choices shape their audience’s reactions. For example, instructors wanted students’ tone on the résumé and cover letter to reflect the job advertisement and connect holistically with their whole employment application. The employment application assignment lays a foundation for teaching skills for students’ professional advancement: “What [students] don’t realize is that in order to keep your job you have to know how to write these other genres . . . if you ever want to advance in your career” (Instructor 3). Focusing on the intertextuality of the job advertisement, résumé, cover letter, and reports or reflections helps students understand how ecologies of professional documents work together.
Research Question 2: Teaching the Job Application Assignment
Finding and responding to a job advertisement was the essence of the employment application genre ecology. Instructors’ near-consensus about what to include in an employment application assignment reflects these genres’ standardization (Table 2). Instructors felt intense responsibility to both help students grow as writers and to ensure that students were producing quality application materials.
Genres and Documents Included in the Employment Application Assignment.
Note: All 20 instructors asked students to write a resume, with 17 asking for a cover letter and a job advertisement. Twelve instructors asked students to include supplementary documents such as professional reports and personal reflections. Only one instructor taught LinkedIn.
Job Advertisements
Job advertisements were integral to teaching the employment application assignment. Eighteen of these 20 instructors asked their students to tailor résumés and cover letters to real job advertisements (seeTable 2). Seventeen instructors asked students to find a specific job advertisement, while one instructor gave students a preselected advertisement for a merchandise assistant at a local Macy’s. Teaching students to respond to specific parts of the job advertisement prepared them for the next stage of their employment applications: teaching students to align their content, writing choices, and genre awareness with their chosen job advertisement. Instructors mentioned that their students often struggled to understand how users read and use content in professional environments, so responding to job advertisements gave students a real audience for which to arrange their skills and accomplishments.
Cover Letters
Instructors in this study consistently assigned cover letters: 18 of the 20 instructors included the cover letter in their job application assignments. Instructors used several key learning objectives to justify teaching the cover letter: making writing choices effective for that situation, learning organization, increasing genre awareness, and the intertextuality of the job advertisement, cover letter, and résumé. Instructor 4 allowed students the option of writing a cover letter or a personal statement for graduate school applications. The next section highlights how instructors viewed effective cover letters.
How did instructors describe an effective cover letter?
Instructors agreed that an effective cover letter was customized for a specific company and included appropriate detail. An effective cover letter was tailored to a specific company and position: Instructors wanted to see “personalization” (Instructor 17) and that students could “do work for the reader. Show rather than tell” about their skills (Instructor 13). Students needed to show their value to a company, because “nobody cares why you need this job. They care what you can do for them and that’s what you need to foreground” (Instructor 18) in the cover letter. Instructors pushed students to personalize content, show their value, and make readability easy.
More specifically, instructors wanted students to use the cover letter to curate and explain their qualifications, also explored in the personal reflections some instructors asked for. Students often struggled with showing evidence or with mentioning a qualification, but not lending it full weight and meaning: One [cover letter] says, “I’ve taken part in cyber threats and simulations and I’ve learned greatly from those experiences.” Can you mention one or two lessons? It’s common for students at the freshman or sophomore level to make a statement, but not support it. . . . This is an instance where a student has a qualification but isn’t expressing it fully. (Instructor 10)
Teaching students to fully express their qualifications was an important step for their transition from a student to a degree-holder, as “missed opportunities” to display their skills could cost them an interview (Instructor 10). This transition relies on students’ mastery of tone as well as their abilities to construct compelling arguments and arrange content according to readers’ needs.
How was an effective cover letter organized?
Instructors had firm ideas about organization in this high-stakes genre, as they believed that hiring managers wanted to skim a specific format. From internationally ranked business schools to rural colleges, instructors consistently taught the same four-paragraph organizational order, worrying that deviations would annoy or distract hiring managers. Instructor 1 taught her cover letter with strict organizational expectations for students to write four paragraphs: one paragraph giving context about the job-seeker, two paragraphs about their specific skills and “how they used those skills effectively in a previous position,” (Instructor 1) and a final paragraph where students could present their value to the company before a complimentary closing. Instructor 1’s approach to the “ego-stroking paragraph” asked students to explicitly define why is it that they want to interview with that particular company. . . . What is it that they are not only able to really contribute, but why that particular company versus the thousands of others that are available to them? And again, that needs to link back to their job description.
Cover letters serve as bridges between job advertisements and résumés; furthermore, instructors wanted to teach how the skills paragraphs in a cover letter “translate” (Instructor 19) students’ skills for a busy hiring manager, rather than repeating the résumé’s content.
How does the cover letter interact with the résumé and job advertisement?
Along with a crisp organizational pattern, instructors wanted the cover letter to connect the job advertisement with students’ résumés. Tailored cover letters were judged to be more effective. Students did not always understand how many people would be applying to job postings or how many openings companies advertised. Instructors gave students feedback on minutia such as including a job posting’s reference number to ensure that applicants would be considered for the correct opening. However, instructors advised against copying and pasting the language of the advertisement into their cover letter; simply repeating, instead of expanding on, the language of the job advertisement caused problems with a “lack of specificity” (Instructor 7). Some students struggled to find a balance between including skills and accomplishments in both documents while not repeating wording verbatim.
Instructors noticed when students included experiences and qualifications on their résumés but did not include these in their cover letters. “[Hiring managers are] comparing the two documents back and forth. She mentions that she has experience writing game reviews and assisting in editing other video game writers. That doesn’t appear on the résumé” (Instructor 2). Omissions were particularly noticeable when a student’s résumé was short. Instructors also noted the opposite problem: students sometimes repeated their résumé word-for-word in the cover letter. Repeating the résumé in the cover letter was “wasting your reader’s time” (Instructor 8). Instead, the cover letter was viewed as “drawing out specific examples to make that résumé more appealing” (Instructor 10).
What genre features and visual design strategies did instructors expect in the cover letter?
To these instructors, the content of the cover letter was just as important as its genre markers. Instructors believed that they should teach letter format in detail, because few students today know how to write letters: “Do you know how many have actually done it before? Like 10 percent” (Instructor 5). Thus, students did not understand why they needed to include inside and outside addresses, the date, or the “enclosure” at the letter’s end. This example of how instructors discuss genre is why I chose to use CDA: while the genres of résumés and cover letters have crystalized since the 1980’s, the surrounding context has changed. Along with emphasizing “the practice of writing the headers and return address” (Instructor 14), teaching business letter format gives tangible examples and practice for effectively organizing content to lead readers to take action. Outside of BPC courses, students rarely write business letters before entering organizational contexts; if BPC courses are the only courses where students learn to write effective letters, then students’ awareness of how letters work within genre ecologies depends on how the service course instructs them.
Throughout this research, instructors discussed how an effective cover letter would look, based on retrospective recall (Still & Koerber, 2010), of their feedback on students’ employment applications. During her interview, Instructor 6 talked through her student’s cover letter, focusing on how the letter’s format facilitated the social action of the cover letter: securing the student an interview at a gaming company.
Obviously, [the cover letter] looks a lot like a letter. . . . He says where he found the job. He says upfront what his skills are, the degree he’s getting, and his experience in the Navy. And I find again, it’s that foot in the door of . . . a gaming company. And they I’m sure get a gazillion letters at a time. This is one that they may actually pause at and think about. Instead of “I’ve been a gamer my whole life,” this guy is saying “I have actual skills. Here are my skills. Here’s my experience. Please consider my application.” (Instructor 6)
The cover letter is often difficult for students to write well until they understand how to articulate their professional identities. While the genre of a cover letter is concrete, students need to be able to explain what they offer to prospective employers. Instructors wanted to see that students could translate and explain their résumés while not merely repeating its contents. Instructors viewed the cover letter as a high-stakes writing situation in a genre with a set format—a genre they found surprisingly difficult for students to master.
Résumés
All 20 instructors included a résumé as part of their employment application assignment. Instructors’ opinions about organization and presenting students’ skills and accomplishments show potential ways to teach students to write effective résumés. Networking events for students with quality résumés (Instructor 1), consulting with the campus career center (Instructor 9), and collecting two résumés from their industry to use as models (Instructor 20) gave students opportunities to understand how résumés fit into their career paths; however, no instructors in this study mentioned ATS when teaching the employment application assignment.
How was an effective résumé organized?
To these instructors, an effectively organized resume included students’ education, work experience, volunteer experience, honors and awards, and specific skills—although not necessarily in that order. After including their contact information, Instructor 10 told his students to “lead with their best stuff. For some students, their education is their best stuff. For others, it will be their experience.” While the genre of a résumé is stable, instructors believed that the résumé’s content can still be arranged to align with readers’ needs and to showcase students’ best content first—with the exception that work experience should appear in reverse chronological order to give a timeline of students’ jobs. In contrast, instructors mentioned that students often included their education as the first section of their résumés because of advice given by university career centers. Instructor 2 countered the career center’s typical advice, telling students to include their education “wherever it’s relevant.” Instructors believed that students may not realize how elastic résumé organization can be.
Instructors had conflicting opinions about whether to include a summary or objective section. Most instructors in this study did not ask students to write an objective; skills summaries were more popular, although not all students included these sections, particularly when students had relevant, compelling experience to display instead. If students wrote summaries, though, they often struggled. “It’s not a summary about who you are. It’s a summary about what you’re looking for” (Instructor 9). This genre-confusion was typical for students’ résumés discussed in these interviews.
How did effective résumés present applicants’ skills and accomplishments?
These answers were divided into higher order concerns and lower order concerns. Higher order concerns led instructors to consider how bullet points shaped students’ content. Bullet points acted as a visual shortcut for presenting duties and accomplishments, a strategy for students to transcend their job duties and to think about skills that employers were looking for. As a former consultant, Instructor 9 read her students’ résumés with the eye of a hiring manager, focusing on “transferable skills” instead of “job tasks:” The experience where it says lifeguard, [town] YMCA, tells me what the lifeguard does. I know what a lifeguard does. What I need to know is if he was responsible for monitoring water quality. Then, that means he’s able to work independently and he is able to convert and interpret scientific information to a practical use.
Hiring managers want to see students’ metacognitive work about their skills. Still, Instructor 9 did not have a method for teaching students how to make meaning from their skill-sets. Instructor 19 suggested the STAR method, where interviewees discuss the “Situation/Task,Action, andResult” (DDI, n.d.) of a situation to give an interviewer a sense of their strengths. The STAR method is “usually used for interviews but [students] use it for accomplishment statements . . . to actually make sure that they’re accomplishments not necessarily just your responsibilities.” Focusing on data, not opinion, is an important mental shift for students to make as they form their professional identities.
Lower order concerns, such as including a specific number of bullet points in a list and using parallel verb structure, contributed to instructors’ narratives about themselves as gatekeepers for students’ professionalization. Instructors said that lists should include “at least three bullets. No more than five” (Instructor 16) and include a period at end of each list item. Instructors also sought this level of detail in students’ verb use, telling students to begin list items with “action verbs” and present a “transferrable skill and a task” (Instructor 5). Instructor 10 noticed when students used specific action verbs, such as “assist, work, [and] communicate.” These verbs helped students “[show] the company what it is you did exactly . . . . what they can actually use to contribute to their mission” (Instructor 11). These lower order concerns supported students’ purpose: to write a résumé that made students compelling job seekers.
Specifically, students often struggle to understand the difference between objective skills and personal characteristics. While concrete skills such as speaking Cantonese or programming in JavaScript are important and relevant, many students attempt to show their professional skills through vague language. Students’ skill sections are often underwritten, including skills such as “leadership skills” and “ability to engage” (Instructor 8). Instructor 8 further wanted students to include concrete, specific skills to answer a hiring manager’s question: “What makes me, as an employer, want to believe you over all the other applicants who claim they are excellent communicators?” Students, especially STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) majors, struggled to write about their soft skills in a meaningful way, as soft skills are implicit and difficult to quantify. Students may be able to show their soft skills through volunteer experience or on-campus activities. Part of this problem is genre based: “the conventions of a résumé I don’t think allow for very much promotion of your soft skills, like good patience or a good work ethic” (Instructor 18). Résumés are set up to quantify students’ skills and achievements, while the cover letter and interview give students space to present their implicit characteristics. The best answer that instructors had for the concerns that Instructor 8 and Instructor 18 raised was to connect soft skills with the job advertisements. Overall, instructors agreed that writing a tailored résumé that aligned their accomplishments and soft skills with employers’ expectations was a difficult task for many students.
Other Employment Documents
In contrast to the near consensus on job advertisements, cover letters, and résumés, instructors differed when asking students to include other employment documents as part of this assignment. AsTable 2indicates, 12 of these 20 instructors asked students to write additional job-related documents across three categories: professional reports, personal reflections, and miscellaneous. Seven of the 20 instructors asked students to write professional reports, including an Investigative report about their job advertisement (Instructors 3 and 6), a field overview (Instructor 12), and a job listing analysis (Instructor 15). Six instructors asked students to write personal reflections using BPC genres, such as a career memo (Instructor 4), a reflection letter (Instructor 17), and a reflection about their résumé revisions (Instructor 20).
Professional Reports
Seven of these instructors asked students to write additional documents to support their professional development. These documents focused students’ attention outward, on workplace norms, external research, and report writing. Instructors benefitted from using these documents to gauge students’ progress as writers and to check students’ work throughout the employment application unit.
Investigative reports or a “workplace analysis” (Instructor 12) were popular: Students reported on the workplace to which they were applying as a way of gathering background knowledge. These reports gave students further opportunities to understand their real, external audiences, yielding details about how students could contribute to a company’s mission and culture in their cover letters. Instead of encouraging students to take a scattershot approach to their job hunting, investigative reports helped students to “[craft] those genres” (Instructor 11) for specific companies. Students investigated company size, management and reporting structure, the field, the mission statement, and Glassdoor reviews to “summarize their sense of how this company is portraying itself” (Instructor 12). Students could develop “a feel of what the company’s mission is” and “[make] certain inferences” about the company’s ethos to make stronger rhetorical choices (Instructor 11). Although students did not enjoy writing these investigative reports, Instructors 3 and 6 found them valuable for both the employment application assignment and for teaching engineering students how to write reports. Ideally, students used the report to “fit in the [employer’s] culture” and avoid looking “foolish in a job interview” (Instructor 3). They wanted students to understand how to tailor their job applications for the culture of a specific company while practicing their professional writing skills. Asking students for this level of depth and detail seems to be helpful for undermentored students to supply examples of what questions to ask when looking for knowledge work.
Personal Reflections
Around one third of these instructors asked students to complete personal reflections to complement their work on the employment application assignment. These assignments asked students to evaluate their own skills, abilities, and growth as writers. Skills summaries, whether as a list, “master résumé,” (Instructor 4), or personal portfolio, summarized a “complete inventory of [students’] work experience, their education, and their skills” (Instructor 5). Students could then use their summaries when tailoring their cover letters and résumés for specific job advertisements. Reflections about how students wrote their résumés and cover letters were also popular. When teaching her résumé revision workshop, Instructor 20 asked students to write a short reflection summarizing students’ résumé updates, as “little things make a big difference” when job seekers were “highlighting their strengths” (Instructor 20). For example, one of Instructor 20’s students connected consistency to readers’ needs, only making this realization explicit during the résumé reflection.
Miscellaneous Documents
Miscellaneous documents included genres such as thank you notes, LinkedIn profiles, and gathering résumés from professionals in students’ respective fields. Many students may not realize that common business practice is to write a thank you note, even via email, after interviewing for a job (Instructor 1). Including thank you notes in this assignment has potential to shift students’ thoughts away from the classroom and into the professional realm. To allow students insight into their field, Instructor 20 asked students to find two résumés from their professionals in their fields to use for inspiration during the résumé revision workshop. In a general education course, Instructor 20 wanted students to “interact with résumés from their own profession. I think it’s something that strengthens this [assignment] so that . . . there isn’t a cut-out template that you can use for every situation.” Ultimately, instructors suggested that students compare their résumés and cover letters with the expectations for their disciplines.
LinkedIn profiles were less important in this study than expected. Instructor 12 asked students to complete a “professional online presence” consisting of a LinkedIn profile or a professional website. Instructor 12 was the only instructor in this study who taught students to make LinkedIn profiles; while the online piece of the employment application was important to Instructor 12, she made it part of a genre ecology that reflected realistic ways for students to find employment.
Implications
This section presents implications that connect with larger learning outcomes for the BPC service course: organizing compelling content, using genre ecologies to teach intertextuality, reflecting for metacognition, and legitimizing industry knowledge. Instructors who taught most closely to their pedagogical goals (Doan, in press) asked students to respond to a specific job advertisement, use cover letters to bridge between the advertisement and the résumé, focus résumés around students’ strongest content and qualifications, engage with LinkedIn, report on their desired workplaces, and reflect on their communication strategies. For BPC instructors, these results supply a working analysis of how other instructors enact their pedagogical goals through the employment application assignment.
Organizing Compelling Résumés and Cover Letters
Although the genres of résumés and cover letters seem cemented, one common theme across these interviews was the difficulty of writing a compelling résumé and cover letter. Challenges included tailoring content, understanding how to best present it on the page and screen (Randazzo, 2016), and understanding the types of language and tropes that mark many students as entry-level members of specific fields (Fillenwarth et al., 2018). While résumés have a set format (Randazzo, 2020), the form is more elastic than students sometimes realize (Randazzo, 2019b). Rather than mandating a specific order within résumés, instructors encouraged students to “lead with their best stuff. For some students, their education is their best stuff. For others, it will be their experience” (Instructor 10), according to the content that aligns with their chosen job. Leading with students’ best qualifications puts their strongest content at the top or the right side of résumés where eye-tracking reveals that hiring managers are most likely to read (Bettridge et al., 2017). This level of tailoring to specific job advertisements and students’ strengths can offset how rigidly résumés and cover letters are typically presented and taught, shifting to an emphasis on “relevance” over a reliance on form (Randazzo, 2020, p. 419). Teaching students to balance this information against the norms in their fields or other conflicting advice helps students become stronger business communicators, with an emphasis on the “value” (Randazzo, 2020, p. 421) that they could bring to a company.
Teaching Genre Ecologies Through Intertextuality
Teaching the résumé and cover letter means teaching intertextuality and how multiple documents work together to create a genre ecology. Business communication students need to understand how multiple documents connect to create and sustain knowledge work in real organizations (Lawrence et al., 2017;Spinuzzi, 2003). Connections across documents are not immediately apparent to students, particularly those new to BPC. Viewing the job application assignment as a genre ecology builds the metacognitive work for stronger customization (Randazzo, 2019b) and for a more rigorous focus on these documents’ content (Doan, 2020;Spilka, 2009). Students can apply lessons about audience attention, summarizing and expanding on content, and translating information between paper and screen. Actively curating an accomplishment-centric résumé and cover letter, rather than viewing them as a rigid checklist, leads to a greater sense of intertextuality (Randazzo, 2020).
Reflecting for Metacognition
Adding a reflective component to the employment application assignment helps the résumé and cover letter transcend utilitarian job training. Instructor 13 viewed the job application assignment as a place to “make an argument for how valuable you are” to a company. Instructors set up these learning opportunities for students to practice crafting these arguments by responding to a specific job advertisement. Instructors wanted cover letters to be really targeted—and that’s something it seems like students don’t like . . . in several students’ reflections, adapting a cover letter to an actual job application was so impactful to them, even though that was way back in our first project. (Instructor 17)
When students understand how their writing choices help them accomplish their purposes for writing, students remember those lessons, such asRandazzo’s (2020)annotated résumé activity. Becoming reflexive communicators (Randazzo, 2019a) helps students better understand how their writing choices present themselves as people and asks students to interrogate their uses of language and argument.
Assigning a personal reflection to accompany the employment application assignment asks students to perform metacognition about how their writing and design choices represent their skills, as the employment application assignment is highly individualized. Asking students for metacognition when highlighting their goals and accomplishments can teach students more than to fill out a template or complete a checklist (Randazzo, 2012). Reflecting on the writing choices on their résumés and cover letters encourages students to actively explain and evaluate their writing choices while practicing the tone and clarity that can transfer to other business communication genres. Furthermore, metacognition may prepare students to write self-evaluations at the ends of internships or to help frame the types of jobs they want in the future.
Legitimizing Industry Knowledge
The résumé and cover letter assignment has long been a cornerstone of BPC because it legitimizes industry knowledge, particularly when students are asked to link their employment application assignments to activities such as writing reports about their potential workplaces or gathering two résumés from their own field. As job seekers, many students now need an online presence (Watson, 2019). Students require direct instruction about how to create and curate their online personas when seeking a job, particularly in ways that do not reproduce or exacerbate current inequalities of race (Shelton, 2020), gender (Moore, 2019), and class (Randazzo, 2020). Legitimizing industry knowledge, particularly for instructors who have not worked outside of academia (Doan, 2019), keeps students from solely relying on conflicting university sources, a cause of frustration and mistrust (Randazzo, 2016). Furthermore, this study’s lack of findings about LinkedIn and ATS could imply a disconnect between business communication research and pedagogy (Randazzo, 2020), as business communication research stays largely attuned to LinkedIn’s influence on hiring trends (Bremner & Phung, 2015;Knight, 2019). In our current economic crisis, students are anxious about finding employment; returning to industry knowledge can only serve to help students navigate these trying times.
Limitations
Although this study only collected data from 20 instructors, I mitigated this limitation by collecting large amounts of data from each instructor: a demographics survey, a 30 to 70 minute interview, a syllabus, an assignment sheet, and one section’s collection of students’ deidentified résumés and cover letters with instructors’ feedback. This research design was tested in a four-instructor pilot study for reliability (Doan, 2019). Furthermore, the average number of instructors in a business or technical communication study is only 12 (Melonçon & St. Amant, 2019). Conducting in-depth interviews with 20 participants can lead to helpful implications, even when not generalizable (Smith, 2017); however, instructor interviews largely revealed similar results about how they approached the résumé and cover letter. A second limitation of this study is the low ratio of nontenure-track instructors to tenure-track or tenured instructors. Eighty-seven percent of service courses are taught by nontenure-track instructors (Melonçon & England, 2011); however, nontenure-track instructors generally have high teaching loads that preclude them from participating in time-intensive studies such as this. While recruiting more nontenure-track faculty would have led to a more accurate snapshot of the service course, it was difficult to recruit instructors for this data-rich study, as de-identifying students’ résumés and cover letters was time consuming for participants. Many of the instructors here were also white and nominally middle class; thus, this article’s findings about teaching the résumé and cover letter may not fully address racism, sexism, ableism, or classism that students may face (Randazzo, 2019a;Shelton, 2020). In the demographics survey, I did not collect data about instructors’ terminal degrees; instead, I collected data about instructors’ coursework: 11 of these 20 instructors had graduate-level coursework specifically about teaching the BPC service course. This data would have helped this study extend recent findings about instructors without BPC degrees who teach the service course (Melonçon et al., 2020).
Assumptions about pedagogy may not always align with results of a pedagogical study, as I had presumed that all instructors would teach both the résumé and cover letter and that more than a single instructor would explicitly include LinkedIn in their employment application assignments. The lack of LinkedIn instruction was surprising, considering BPC’s recent literature concerning LinkedIn profiles (Bremner & Phung, 2015;Moore, 2019;Smart & DiMaria, 2018). To teach LinkedIn, instructors should be given increased training and resources.
Conclusions
Through examining how the employment application assignment is taught, this article presents challenges and opportunities for BPC instructors to enact their pedagogical values in the service course classroom. To confirm current research’s insights and to unite them with praxis, a study of instructors across differing institutions addresses the pedagogical implications of teaching the résumé and cover letter, to confirm the fields’ general values with data, and to provide a primer for new instructors about the field’s pedagogical goals. Understanding how instructors enact their pedagogy through examining their teaching provides an opportunity to critically evaluate the extent to which service course instructors are able to articulate and enact their pedagogical goals. In particular, this study highlights the “gap between pedagogical ideas or philosophies and classroom practice” (Warnock et al., 2017, p. 155) in the BPC service course and concludes with values that BPC successfully imparts.
This article reveals several current challenges in BPC pedagogy that show how the field has room to grow, as the demand for our students’ skills continues to increase. Due to current working conditions, BPC should turn its attention to creating training resources for novice instructors and providing professional development for instructors without a graduate degree in BPC fields or specific courses in BPC pedagogy. Greater opportunities for professional development can encourage instructors to build their courses around the heuristics, decisions, and intertextuality that form workplace genre ecologies. Shifting away from overreliance on textbooks and toward pedagogy that centers students as workplace decision makers can provide greater opportunities for deep, project-based learning. Furthermore, technology has transformed students’ job searches through LinkedIn, ePortfolios, and online networking opportunities. While BPC has significant research in these areas, including these technologies in employment application assignments can help to bridge the gap between our research and pedagogy. However, BPC must remember that technologies and professional norms are not free of discrimination based on race, class, and gender.
In this article, I highlight areas where instructors largely succeed in teaching the service course. By teaching the employment application assignment, instructors are teaching students a real-world genre with high stakes. Connecting classroom activities to purposes that students actively value imbues the service course with relevance to students’ academic and workplace ambitions (Fillenwarth, et al., 2018). Teaching the résumé and cover letter as a set of interdependent genre ecologies can foster greater student engagement and encourages students to think about how genres relate to and build their skills beyond the employment application. These real purposes, audiences, and contexts can be opportunities to help students transition their communication skills into new situations. Instructors’ current emphases on visual design and formatting shows students how visual and digital design has potential to enhance or detract from a document’s purpose. Asking students to deconstruct and analyze job advertisements is a form of close reading that students can take from the classroom to their future lives. Enacting these pedagogical values of writing, design, and decision making in the BPC classroom has value for students’ learning in the service course and beyond.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank research participants for their generous insights and Lisa Melonçon and Chalice Randazzo for conversations that shaped this project.
Author’s Note
This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (Approval No. 18.200). Participant comments are reproduced by permission.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author (s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was supported by the C. R. Anderson Grant and the Marty Baker Graham Award from the Association for Business Communication.
Author Biography