When you are preparing your writing resume, do you include work that you have done for free? You should!
The purpose of sending a prospective client your resume is to share some information about your background, education, and work experience. All the writing you have done, whether you have been paid for it or not, is part of your experience, and you should add it to your resume. When someone is considering whether they want to work with you, they care about your experience, not whether you actually got paid.
If you had to write papers in college, then that is writing experience. Many jobs have some element of writing in them, and this is also experience that you can put on a resume. You may have been responsible for contributing to a newsletter for your church or another organization on a volunteer basis, and that counts as writing experience too.
Your resume is not a static document that you prepare once and then you’re done. (Yes, I can hear the collective groan as you read this.) Every so often, you need to review it and make changes as necessary. As you gain experience and have more information to add to the resume, you can update it to focus on your more recent work.
When I was starting out, I wrote for a couple of web sites on a volunteer basis. The experience gave me some samples to show to prospective clients. I still list them on my resume and no one has asked whether (or how much) I got paid for writing them.
Do you include paid and non-paid writing on your resume or do you list paid work only?
Nicely said, Jodee. Like you, I always list non-paid work as well. Since, by profession, I’m an IT Geek, most writing jobs look at me somewhat askance: without the 2-3 years of voluntary editing and writing experience for a big website, I’d probably never even be considered. I figure it’s the same work as if I’d been paid for it, so why not mention it? If I’d sucked, the site would still have binned me!
Putting non-paid work on your résumé is fine — but “I wrote papers in college”? Who, among those applying to writing jobs, didn’t? I would leave that bit off. Sounds like something from the Obvious Department.
I would say that writing in school should be left out if you have plenty of professional writing experience (paid or not) or if it has nothing to do with the gig you’re applying for.
What do you think?
My BA is in English Writing Arts, so my college writing experience could be a resume on its own. However, a gig writing tech articles really wouldn’t care if I took three years of college poetry writing.
Hi Jodee,
I totally agree with you and Spike. It’s important to include any writing that you’ve done for free especially if it may open a door in an area of writing that would otherwise be closed. I include both on my writing resume.
I totally agree that writing you do for free “counts.” It’s your experience that matters, after all.
I don’t necessarily want to condone the idea that freelance writers should work for nothing, so when I wanted to learn a new skill (in this case, resume writing), I volunteered at a career day for women living in a local shelter.
I really do recommend volunteering your time to a worthy cause as a way to expand your services. Not that volunteering should be a self-serving endeavor, but you do get that satisfied feeling of helping people, and you often make great contacts.
@ BDLu: Thank you for taking the time to comment. Not everyone applying for writing jobs went to college and has experience writing papers for courses they were enrolled in.
@ Diana: I think that when you are starting out you need to list whatever experience you have. Over time, you can update your resume to make it more current. My first paying freelance writing client hired me on a trial basis without seeing a resume or samples.
Having relevant samples to show a client is always the better way to go. The people I’m working with would rather focus on what I can do for them now than what I wrote in college, even though two of my essays were awarded perfect marks.
@Jodee That was basically my point. If you have absolutely no other experience, then fine — list whatever you can. Otherwise, listing school papers as writing experience is like listing babysitting as job experience; employers don’t care.
And of course don’t discount exceptional school work. Last year I interviewed a college sophomore studying art education. She had designed the curriculum and taught an art class for a children’s cancer ward. Sadly I didn’t over-achieve like that in college, but if I had, I would definitely have kept it on my resume.
Volunteer work (i.e. unpaid) is valid experience and should be listed in your resume. However, like other jobs listed, it should put your best foot forward and follow the PAR rule.
Currently, I am doing a couple of freelance writing jobs that are unpaid. I will be adding them to my resume because they are good examples of my hard work, even if they aren’t paying me. I wouldn’t have taken these kinds of gigs if I weren’t going to treat them as experience to have on my resume. Regardless of the pay, it is still my work.
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I list some unpaid work on my resume–and even on my writing blog–but I don’t list anything about college papers. In fact, I don’t even list college internships anymore, and I interned at a magazine, a newspaper and a publishing company in college. I have enough professional experience that I’ve accrued since then, though, but I can see where, if that’s all you’ve got, it would be worthwhile to list that sort of thing.