C6 | Thursday, april 17, 2008 WORK SMART WisCONsiN sTaTE JOurNal

the state capital. That means some jobs that could be sus-ceptible to a decline elsewhere — such as construction — may be more resilient here.

Also working in the Madi-son job market’s favor is its range of high-tech positions.

“The high-tech and bio-tech industries are doing well,” Winters said.

Employers in residential construction could scale back due to the downturn in the housing market. “On the whole, I think everyone is a little more cautious because of the slow economic growth,” Winters said. “It’s having an effect all around.”

But, he pointed out, con-struction is continuing in the Madison area.

Brian McKee, past presi-dent of the Madison Area Builders Association and vice president of Midwest Homes and McKee Associates, said construction in Dane County has been slower than in previous years, but is on an upswing of late. He said he’s recently noticed more phone calls to his business from people with home construc-tion questions. “I still see a good job market for con-struction-related jobs,” he said.

Nursing boom

Kris Holmes, a nurse and employment manager at Meriter Hospital, said nursing continues to be an occupation that is “at the top of the list” for recruiters. She said the current job market is “pretty good” for qualified nurses at Madison-area hospitals and even better in rural areas,

which face staffing shortages in nursing.

She predicts an increased demand for nurses due to the aging population. Holmes said other areas of expected employment growth include physical therapists, and cardiovascular, medical imag-ing and bio-technicians. And because electronic medical records are replacing tradi-tional paper charts and are critical to effective and safe patient care, there is a bigger need for non-clinical positions such as information technol-ogy professionals. “We need IT employees to make sure that all systems are running,” Holmes said.

The future in health-care careers is good, she said. “People are staying alive longer and need more care,” Holmes said. “Health care is a really stable work environment.”

dren and students attending colleges, community colleges and trade schools.

Outside of those areas, the falling value of the dollar against many foreign curren-cies is helping to power an ex-port boom, which is benefiting farmers and some segments of manufacturing, particularly airplane makers and factories producing various types of heavy machinery where the United States enjoys a com-petitive edge.

But other segments of manufacturing are not faring nearly as well. Domestic au-tomakers have been laying off workers in the face of slump-ing sales as the weak economy and soaring gasoline prices cut

into demand. Other manufac-turers, such as appliance and furniture makers, have been hurt by the deep downturn in housing.

Construction, decimated by the housing slump, has been shedding jobs. Hiring has also fallen in related industries such as real estate agents and mortgage brokers, as well as at the Wall Street firms that have declared billions of dollars in losses from bad investments on securities backed by sub-prime mortgages.

In general, hiring is expect-ed to hold up in areas where consumers will keep spending money regardless of the health of the economy, such as at gro-cery stores, gasoline stations and repair shops. But com-panies selling discretionary services — such as various seg-ments of the tourism industry, from airline travel to hotels

to restaurants — are likely to experience more layoffs.

Small businesses, which generate the bulk of the country’s new jobs, are decid-edly more pessimistic. William Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Businesses, said hiring plans had plum-meted, with the number of firms saying they planned to hire new workers exceeding those planning job cuts by just 3 percent in March, down from 11 percent in the group’s February survey.

Government employment generally holds up during a recession because of increased demand for services, although some states are warning of cutbacks due to falling tax revenues. Federal, state and lo-cal governments added 18,000 jobs in March, according to a recent jobs report.

MadisonContinued from Page C1

JobsContinued from Page C1

sume, you’re going to be hard-pressed to fill a whole page. That’s OK. Anything on your resume that is not an achievement is wasting space. Because you don’t know what a hiring manager will look at first — and if you have 10 good achievements and three mediocre lines about your life story, the hiring manager may only read those three lines — so remove them.

Don’t make your resume a moral statement; it’s a marketing document.

Think about when a com-pany announced the launch of their product. First of all, the product is not done. Second of all, it has bugs. And third, the company is probably showing photos of prototypes and the real thing will look different.

All this stuff is fine. It’s ac-cepted practice for marketing. The company will tell you that they are doing their best to get you the information you want in the way they think is best for letting you know what your consumer options are.

You need to take the same approach with your resume,

because a resume is a market-ing document. The best mar-keting documents show the product in the very best light, which means using whatever most outrageous tactics pos-sible to make you look good. As long as you are not lying, you will be fine.

Don’t give everything away in the resume.

The idea of a resume is to get someone to call you, to talk with you on the phone. To offer you an interview. So a resume is like a first date. You only show your best stuff and you don’t show it all.

Some people dump every-thing they can think of onto their resume, but a resume is not the only chance you’ll have to sell yourself. Indeed, the in-terview is where the hard-core selling takes place. So you only put your very best achievements on the resume. Sure, there will be other questions people will want answers to, but that will make them call you.

For those of you who can’t bear to take off the 20 extra lines on your resume because you think the interviewer has to see every single thing about you right away, consider that we have statistics to show that people don’t want to know everything up front. It doesn’t

make for a good match. Of people who got married, only 3 percent had sex on the first date.

Penelope Trunk is a national career columnist who took her own advice and moved from New York to Madison in search of a better work-life balance. She is the author of “Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success.” Read her blog at http://

TrunkContinued from Page C1

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