I spent $800 on a career coach

💼 Topic: I spent $800 on a career coach

🔗 Quick links: Funny, helpful, and inspirational LinkedIn posts

📣 Get an interview chat guide: Share this newsletter with 1 friend to get the guide!

BFCM traffic costs a fortune. If your Shopify brand isn’t converting at its possible best, you’re not just losing sales — you’re burning money and shrinking Q4 margins.

Zipchat.ai is the AI Agent built for DTC ecommerce. It doesn’t just chat — it sells.

That’s why brands like Police, TropicFeel, and Jackery — brands with 10k visitors/month to millions — trust Zipchat to handle their busiest quarter and fully embrace Agentic Commerce.

Setup takes less than 20 minutes with our success manager. And you’re fully covered with 37 days risk-free (7-day free trial + 30-day money-back guarantee).

On top, use the NEWSLETTER10 coupon for 10% off forever.

Try Zipchat free

One of the only things I consistently try to be is a

The idea is to always be open to learning, and never consider yourself a master at anything.

I follow this mindset for a few reasons:

Take career advice for example, I talk about this topic all the time and I’ve even coached several clients on it.

Yet, despite all this, I paid $800 last week for a career coach.

Why? Because despite all that I’ve learned in these 3 years, there is always room for more.

For my scenario in particular, I figured my resume was already solid, but after just 1 session with my coach, I discovered so many areas I could improve.

Which leads me to today.

You and me both, we’ve sought resume advice before, but some of it tends to butt heads with each other.

Example, I’ve had one colleague tell me it’s okay for resumes to be 2 pages, and another swear to keep it under 1 page.

So, which advice should we follow?

I think the best resume advice comes from people who are actual hiring managers.

Luckily for us, my coach used to be one, so believe me when I took his advice word-for-word.

It’s also the same advice I’ll be distilling in today’s article.

If you’re looking for resume tips straight from the mouth of an ex-hiring manager, then follow along below.

(BTW this is the coach) → Profile

The career community might be divided on this, but I’m not.

The first non-negotiable mentioned was to keep my resume 1 page.

When recruiters are only spending 6-7 seconds scanning resumes, it’s crucial that yours gets straight to the point

And if a coach who has over a decade of work experience is still keeping his resume 1 page, you should too.

I thought my education wasn’t relevant since it’s been 2 years since I graduated.

Turns out, hiring managers will find your education relevant if you have less than 5 years of work experience.

My coach’s recommendation is to either:

A. Put your education section first up top

B. Put it second-last, above your skills section

Either is fine.

You know the dates you add for each work experience?

Turns out, they don’t have to be specific for that role.

For example, I technically started at OMERS on the product team in October 2024. But putting October would leave an awkward time gap on my resume.

My previous roles at OMERS weren’t that relevant to my industry though, so I didn’t want to add them either.

The solution is simple, just omit the previous experience and put down the date you started at company in general.

This might be just me, but I thought you weren’t supposed to do this.

It was reassuring to hear otherwise from my coach.

This tips goes beyond just baking in keywords from the job description, it’s understand how the company communicates.

For example, one of my bullet points used to be “created a newsletter.”

This was my coach’s advice.

This advice extends to whatever industry you’re on.

Copying in keywords is a start, fundamentally understanding the target company’s language is the next level.

This one was more-so implied.

Never once during our 1 hour session did my coach say:

In truth, you don’t need one.

Think about it this way.

If your summary section doesn’t describe specific achievements, (ex. launched a new SaaS product at X company leading to 30% increase in revenue) then it’s fluff.

But, if you’re going to get specific, might as well do it in the bullet points.

There’s a lot of resume advice out there.

That being said, you can’t argue with advice coming from someone who’s been on the hiring side.

Anyways, my newly revamped resume is linked below if you’d like a look!

That’s all for today. If you enjoyed this post, share it with a friend!

If they subscribe, I’ll send you a interview guide!

To refer, use your unique link.

See you next Tuesday 🤝

-Michael Ly

🔗 Forget tutors, Google just reimagined how we learn [Read post]

🔗 Want to keep up with AI? These YouTube channels will help [Read post]

🔗 Clever AI prompts to reverse-engineer your resume [Read post]

{{rp_personalized_text}}

Or copy and paste your unique link to them: {{rp_refer_url}}