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How to Write a Great Resume, Part 3 of 4 – Work Experience

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Believe it or not, if you have completed Part 1 and Part 2 of this series of How to Write a Great Resume, you have done the hardest part. Now, you just need to support everything that you’ve said in the summary.

Separate Responsibilities from Achievements

Let’s start by going over the basic structure for the experience section of the resume. You can’t go wrong if you have 2-4 sentences related to what you were held accountable for, followed by bulleted achievements.

The Two Words You Should Never Use On Your Resume

Whatever you do, don’t begin a job description with “responsible for…”. Potential employers don’t care, and it makes the sentence passive.

Words That Capture Attention of Hiring Managers

Employers are interested in how your past success can help them solve their current issues. While you may not know the specific problems they need solved, all employers are interested in ways they can save money or time, increase revenue, make their work easier, become more competitive, and build better relationships. Keep this in mind when framing your achievements.

The CAR Strategy: Challenge – Action – Results

Accomplishments are the lynchpin to any great resume. Companies want to hire people who have done great things, and an easy way to show that is to use the CAR strategy. You don’t need to include every part of the CAR strategy in your resume, but do include the most important – the results. Below is an example of a CAR story.
CAR strategy

If you’re struggling to find material for your accomplishments, start looking at your performance evaluations, job description, status reports, nice notes from customers, or notes of appreciation from colleagues. A best practice is to keep a file of all these types of items as well as your own personal summary of projects as you complete them. This way you’ll have the baseline data to formulate accomplishments.

Action Verbs and Front-loaded Bullets

When you present your impact statement or accomplishments, you should always start the bullet point with an action verb. The Resume Writing Academy has a great list of action verbs free for you to use.

In addition to starting with an action verb, it is also best to lead the bullet with the result. This is called front-loading. In other words put the most important information first. Here is a before and after example:

Front-loaded bullet

How Much Experience to Include

Career professionals across the board agree on it’s only necessary to show the last 10-15 years of experience. The exceptions to this rule would be if you were employed at the same company for more than that, or if you are returning to the workforce after break.

What if I Have an Employment Gap?

Periods of unemployment happen for a variety of reasons, and today it is more common for employers to overlook a gap, especially when you can show you weren’t standing still during that period.

If you have a short gap, say 3-6 months, an easy way to cover this is to leave off the months, and only state the years of employment. Hiring managers will usually see through this, so be prepared to address the gap in the interview.

If you have a longer period of unemployment, be sure to focus on things you were doing during that time. It’s OK to have a line in your resume that states something similar to “Voluntarily stepped down from corporate role to focus on life priorities: provided early childhood support to kids; volunteered as membership chair of mother of multiples group and increased new members 15%. Now resolved to pursue next professional challenge.”

Use a Consistent Format

When writing out the details of your career, make sure you treat all employer names, dates, job titles and accomplishments the same. This will make your resume easy to scan. Check out this resume that details out the components and has a simple format to follow. You’ll also get a preview of the last installment of this series, How to Write a Great Resume, Part 4 of 4 — Education and More.

Do you have specific questions about how to present your experience? Ask them in the comments, and we’ll respond.

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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