Think about Your Audience

• If your resume will help you secure a job after college graduation, a logical place to get help is your college or university's career development office. Also, the Internet contains lots of free resume tutorials, resume templates and resume examples posted by other educational institutions. When you read through examples, look for phrases that specifically address self-employment experience. Determine if a phrase fits your experience and matches the writing style already evident in your resume.
  
  

Emphasize Different Aspects of Entrepreneurship

• If you're completing a business degree and seeking a corporate job, emphasize ways that you've honed entrepreneurial skills through self-employment. Talk about innovations and business process improvements you achieved. If you're applying for a government job, focus on how past self-employment involved record keeping, accountability, working with the public and other skills desired in government workers.
  
  

Focus on Projects

• Approach the description of self-employment from a project perspective. When you list a period of 12 months or more in which you mostly worked for yourself, you might have adapted your work style to fit the needs of diverse clients. Describe these experiences in terms of the projects you completed. For example, describe writing career articles for a major employment website and writing resumes for workers employed by a local temporary agency as separate entries on a resume. While writing is your focus, writing career articles and writing resumes require different specialized skills.
  
  

Be Specific in Describing Experiences

• Find the right phrasing to describe each type of work experience during self-employment. In general, this means including buzzwords on your resume that you found listed in a job posting. But sometimes buzzwords aren't easy to find and you must consult a career guide to find them. Or check the employer's website for position descriptions, especially government agency websites. For example, describe freelance writing as "completed technical writing projects for small manufacturing clients" and describe home appraisals as "estimated the value of client homes prior to real estate closings."