Reordering/Grouping Credits & Media Items on Resumes by "Display Order #"

Within the "Manage My Resumes" builder/editor interface, you have a variety of options for updating, grouping, arranging, and reordering your credits, experiences, and media items (photos, videos, links, etc.).

USE THE "DISPLAY ORDER" OPTION:

To have exact control over the order in which items appear within the various sections of your resume, make sure to give each item an unique "Display Order #" when creating the item on your resume.

However, even if you forget to do this the first time, don't worry -- you can always go back and add or update the Display Order Number by clicking on the Edit (wrench) button next to the item on your resume. Just change the Order Number in the editing/update panel, and  then save your changes.

Updating the order of your credits is especially easy: Just change the Display number next to any of the Education/Training credits and Experience/Job credits you wish to reorder and then click the "Go" button next to the "Update" option at the bottom of the form. The order of all of your credits will then change appropriately.

(Quick Tip: Turn on the checkbox next each item in your list of credits in order to update a specific set of credits.)

GROUP CREDITS BY "TYPE":

To group your various types of credits together, simply assign each group of credits sequential Display Order numbers,” using the “Order Number” field.

For instance, I might assign my Film credits with numbers 10-40; and my TV credits with numbers 50-70; and my Theatre credits with numbers 100-140. This would make my Film credits appear first (and grouped together), my TV credits appear second, etc.

We recommend “skipping” numbers in between groups, so that you can go back and easily add in new credits later. For instance, if you used the numbering system I’ve described above, then you could add a new Film credit with the number 9 to make it appear at the top of your film credits; or use the number 41 to make it appear at the bottom of your film credits.

With this system, you can make any particular group of credits appear at any point you’d like within the Experiences section of your resume simply by assigning appropriate Order Numbers to the credits that will keep them grouped together in the way you like best (e.g., have your film credits appear first, or your theatre credits appear first, etc.).

You can group credits together by type or topic (film, TV, theatre, commercials, etc.) or break them apart (for instance, if you wanted to put professional Equity theatre projects near the top of your resume and school theatre projects at the bottom of your resume, with film/TV credits in the middle – or whatever unique order you prefer. (This type of alternate arrangement of credits is not something that we recommend, but some actors like to play around with different ways of ordering and grouping their experiences on their resume.)

See the two screen shots below for examples of Display Order numbers in action:

Which results in:

To see a working example of a real resume with a long list of nicely grouped credits, visit http://casting.backstage.com/resumes/link.asp?actor=SRIGORDON

For more tips and tricks, check out:

http://backstage.blogs.com/the411faq/resume_help/

-- Luke Crowe, National Casting Editor, Back Stage