What's in it for you?

Today's new workforce faces challenges requiring practical skills and a variety of experiences to adapt to changing labour market needs. By participating in Work-Integrated Learning opportunities, you'll be exposed to different experiences and workplaces. Through these placements, you'll build your portfolio of skills and connections to successfully prepare you to tackle real-world problems and become competitive in your job search.

Resume:

There are generally three categories within your resume where you can include your international experiences:

  • Education: if you studied or completed coursework abroad, as well as any research done abroad
  • Experience: if you worked or volunteered outside of Canada
  • Skills: if you gained unique skills from having an international background or have been exposed to different sets of cultural skills

Cover Letter:

You may be able to talk about how your international experience gave you the skills to meet the requirements of the position if that is the case. 

Interviews:

During the interview, you can include your international experience in any questions such as, “Tell me about yourself” or, “What interests you about the position.” Stories about your international experiences might be called upon to demonstrate your skills and behaviour.

You can talk about your soft skills throughout the whole application process.

 

In the Resume:

Use numbers to illustrate the impact you have made. For example, provide the number of people you have trained / mentored, the size of the team you’ve worked with, or the audience size to which you’ve given a presentation.

 

In the Cover Letter:

Tell short stories that highlight the use of soft skills. You can reiterate the numbers from your resume in depth, but make sure to mention any mentorship, teaching or teamwork experiences, or when you’ve engaged with customers in a meaningful way. 

 

In the Interview:

Include soft skills in your answers. As you tell your story using the STAR method, provide examples of how your soft skills helped you solve a problem or manage a complication situation. When a “how did you…” question is asked, you can generally include your soft skills within your answer.

Your post-secondary institution may have a job portal or website dedicated to listing student jobs from around your community. Each province and territory, as well as the federal government, has a job board available to all. These jobs are posted from all sectors of the economy, including private and public sectors. 


Corporate job sites are also a common way to find jobs. Places like Indeed, Workopolis, and Glassdoor are all popular job posting sites. The other place to check out is LinkedIn, where you’ll be able to build up your profile and use it to apply directly to jobs or network with recruiters. 

Cover letters are about convincing the employer that there is a match between your skills and qualifications, and the employer’s needs. The goal should be to answer the following questions: 

  • “What do you want the employer to know about you and your experiences?”;
  • “Why do you want to work for this organization and work in this role?”, and 
  • “Why should they hire you?”

The cover letter should fit on one page, and should be tailored to each position, employer, and industry you’re applying to. To customize your cover letter, demonstrate knowledge of the organization and relate your skills and experiences to identify how you can help them accomplish their mandates. 


Extra note: Spend some time researching who to address your cover letter. This shows commitment to wanting to go the extra mile, and can help make you stand out from more generic cover letters. 


For a full guide with templates and examples, see McGill’s Cover Letter Guide

A resume’s main goal is to get you an interview with the employer. The two basic principles are to keep the resume brief and to be formatted correctly. A standard resume should be 1-2 pages in length (if you have limited experience, keep to 1 page), and in reverse chronological order (most recent on top) when listing your education and work experience. When describing work experiences, use bullet points to list accomplishments (both qualitative and quantitative). Each bullet is a full sentence using action words listing the outcome of that action.


Sections to consider including (Order can very):

  • Education
  • Work Experience
  • Volunteer Experience
  • Personal Projects
  • Skills
  • Hobbies and Extracurricular Activities
  • Awards

For a full resume guide with templates and examples, see University of McGill’s How to write a CV.