As a caveat, I am the mother of one Eagle Scout and another son who will, hopefully, soon be one. My feeling is the OP should list it on her resume, at least for her initial job out of college, particularly since she is still active in scouting. As someone noted above, at the very least, it’s a conversation starter.
As a Scout mom, I know many Eagle Scouts, but only 2 Gold Award winners and neither one is my D, who quit GS in 7th grade after one too many pedi parties that I refused to participate in.
The percentage of boys who earn Eagle out of those who start is about 4% or so. Although I know a great many, it’s because my own sons were active in scouting and venturing for years and they are friends with the type of young men who stay in scouting.
I am curious about this analogy and not sure if it is apt - if you are all state or all county in music or a sport when you’re in HS, would you put that on your resume or linked in if the job you are seeking is not directly related to that? Clearly, if you plan to be a coach, having been an all state athlete is something you should list, but otherwise?
Well,sure, the GS Council is going to tell you to put it in. But they know nothing about large corporation hiring. My D1 earned her Gold Award, so I know all about it. But when you are looking for a “real job”, you don’t put things in your resume as a conversation starter. If I saw a college grad listing it, I’d think, “That was at least 5 years ago, haven’t you done more important stuff since then?” And the silver award is even longer ago (which my D also had).
My D1 did not put it on her resume after college. For what it is worth, I wouldn’t put it on LinkedIn, either. Thise are your professional connections. Your “glory days” accomplishments from HS don’t belong there.
I have to agree with @intparent on this for the vast majority of cases. By the time one is finished with college, one should be able to point to accomplishments that will be more recent and more directly perceived, rightly or wrongly, as more pertinent to why they should hire you. The exception I would make is if one happens to know that the hiring manager, or the person interviewing you even if not the direct report, was an Eagle Scout or a Gold Award winner. Unlikely this would be known, I suppose, but if it were then I could see making sure it came up in the interview. I still would not put it on the resume. If they asked why it wasn’t on the resume, you could just say very sincerely that it didn’t seem appropriate to list accomplishments from one’s high school years. But that in your research on the company you had seen that (the interviewer) had been an ES/GAW and so you wanted to mention it. That way in one swoop you establish a common connection and show that you are diligent and clever enough to have done that kind of research ahead of the interview. That would be impressive indeed.
I would also coach the applicant to be prepared to use it as an example if and only if the questioning/conversation made it appropriate to do so. For example, if they asked some variation on the question of “Give me an example of how you are disciplined in your work” or “How would you demonstrate you are goal oriented” then after being sure to give a more recent example I could see saying “And even though I know this was 4-5 years ago, I was a Gold Award winner in the Girl Scouts, basically the equivalent of an Eagle Scout. It takes great discipline and focus on the goal to make that happen. I have never wavered from that trait.” So I think it could be useful, but I also think at the stage of applying for a career job it would seem unprofessional to put it on the resume.
“Every career advisor and Girl Scout leader/council member I’ve had have told me to include both Gold and Silver awards on every application that I apply for”
Well, of course the GS leaders/council members will tell you to put it on there! That’s not really a reliable source, though, of whether it’s meaningful.
Confession time: I was a GS as a kid (I think Junior, possibly Cadette - don’t know if it’s changed), I was a Brownie leader for my D, many moons ago. And I wasn’t even remotely aware that the GS had something called the Gold award that was comparable to a BS Eagle Scout. Am I the only one who didn’t know this?
I am not sure whether the Gold Award has always existed in the Girls Scouts, or whether it was added sometime after I was in Scouting. I have encountered it on resumes of students who are about to graduate from college. I have also seen it in a number of posts on CC.
The Scouting membership guide books seemed to focus on each particular stage of Scouting, as I recall, so one might not encounter it as a Brownie leader.
The leaders of the troop that I was in were not particularly focused on badges. There were some badges of interest to me, but it would have been supremely “dorky” to pursue badges that the rest of the troop was not pursuing. There is probably a requirement for a certain number of badges to receive the Gold Award, as well, which would have wound up being fairly time-consuming if I had decided later to go for badges that the whole troop was not getting.
I was a First Class Girl Scout back in the day. It was a lot of work (although the Gold Award requirements seem more stringent) but I never, ever put it on any of my resumes.
My answer when people ask about resumes, is what is the relevance? I get a lot of resumes as a hiring manager, and to be honest, when I get resumes full of outside interests/awards/etc (I am not talking entry level here), I generally tend to skip over them, because so many of them have no relevance to the job. Showing me you like gardening or you like to read and belong to a book club or you belong to some ethic cultural organization doesn’t say much about your ability to do the job. Someone, on the other hand, who is a volunteer emt or firefighter might mean something to me, those kind of volunteer positions usually means the person has faced situations where they have to think quickly and often outside the box. Someone who is applying for a programming position that involves a lot of math theory, who is active in a math group, might be relevant. My take is that something like being a Girl Scout/Boy Scout at a high level might be okay for an entry level resume, to show character and having followed through on the whole process to get there, but would likely tell someone to ditch it once they have been working, same with things like college GPA, college awards and the like.
The Eagle Scout award simply has better PR than the Gold Award.
I repeat my earlier advice that you should only mention these awards if (a) you are currently activing as an adult scouting leader, and then mention it in context or maybe (b) if it is somehow directly relevant to the job you are seeing (like, maybe a job with a summer camp, or with an outdoorsy enterprise).
Gold Award technically started in 1980. Before that, it was First Class. Some years before that, it was Golden Eaglet. Oh, yeah, that’s totally the equivalent of Eagle Scout.
This is YMMV. I initially didn’t list my college GPA when I worked my first few jobs.
My supervisors and a career coach all recommended that if my college GPA is above a 3.0 and especially above a 3.3 to list it as there’s the possibility the absence of a listed undergrad GPA* would cause some employers/hiring managers to assume one had something to hide by failing to do so. They still list theirs even after being in the workforce for 2-3+ decades. Same with MAJOR college related awards(i.e. Phi Beta Kappa).
They viewed college GPA mainly as a metric to indicate work-ethic and ability to get things done satisfactorily in a timely manner. A low GPA(below 3.0) indicated to them a serious issue with work ethic and/or to get things done in a timely manner to the point the candidate needed to be heavily micromanaged to get good quality work done in a timely manner.
@cobrat:
I have only been asked once about my college GPA (it was after working 10 years) on an interview, and I walked out of it (the manager who did so from what my headhunter told me, was reprimanded for asking it). If hiring managers thing with someone with work experience lasting more than a couple of years thinks undergraduate GPA indicates anything, they have never been trained properly IMO. If someone needs to be micromanaged constantly, you would see it on their resume because they would not show the progression of responsibilities you would expect to see, going from a junior to senior analyst, for example, then maybe a team lead, tech architect, etc,so you would know. If someone is a java developer and they seem to be doing routine programming after X years, it says a lot about them.
Among other things, college GPA generally only indicates how well the student did in classes at college, the correlation between college and the real world is often murky, especially since what you do in college often has very little to do with the way the real world works. Plenty of times the kids with the 4.0 don’t do all that well in the real world, or stumble, whereas the kid with the 3.0 ends up being a star. With kids coming out of college, you often don’t have much else to go on, but once they are established? Not a great indicator of anything IMO.
Not all colleges have the above practices solely on basis of one’s GPA like many other colleges.
Oberlin didn’t have it when I attended. Only honors awarded are departmental honors who opt to do an honors thesis. Someone with a 3.3+ GPA who didn’t opt for an honors thesis would get zilch in this regard.
I teach resume writing in a college class. My general advice - devastating to many students - is that high school accomplishments have no place on a college level resume… with the exception of serious accomplishments such as winning a concerto competition, Eagle Scout or Gold Award, national recognition for something etc. I make them remove all references to their high school education, although I allow them to mention it in their cover letter if, for example, they are applying to teach at their alma mater.
I know the OP is long gone, but this is a continuing issue for many students. Just like that part time job at Burger King will eventually disappear from the resume, so too will high school accomplishments…even though they often have long term impact on the individual and can be mined fruitfully for interview responses.
YMMV depending on the HS one attended and geographic region and/or industry. If it’s a respectable/elite high school with a regional/national/worldwide alumni network, it may actually help to list one’s HS under the education section even after 2-3 decades in the workforce.
Older HS alums who are in supervisory/hiring positions and a few former supervisors who later found I attended one of NYC’s public magnets were astonished I didn’t list it in my resume.
They all felt adding it would be a great positive and wondered why I would leave it off.
Incidentally, most alums of elite day/boarding schools I knew list their HSs on their resumes, linked-in profiles, etc.
Yes, but by the time it came to our attention there were already several good replies and while the OP is no doubt no longer interested, it could be relevant to others. That and the fact that the thread was not very long so far and that there is nothing inherent in the topic that would be out of date, I decided to let it go rather than close it. It doesn’t happen often, but it isn’t a first either.
Seems like a reasonable decision given the postings and as @stradmom says:
I think a general point that can be made here is that with today’s technology, you can easily tailor your resume for the specific job that you are seeking. Indeed, the last time we had a job listing at my office, we noticed (negatively) when applicants did not seem to tailor their resumes and/or cover letters to the specifics of our listing.
So I agree that after college, high school achievements are usually not relevant to job applications. Unless they are.