When you are writing a resume, a long career has many advantages in terms of skills, experience, successes, and a reputation for excellence in your field. But a long career also has two main disadvantages:
- It shows your age.
- The experience most relevant to your job search may be 15 or more years in the past.
At Robin’s Resumes®, we are skilled in professional resume writing techniques for gaining the benefits of a long career while avoiding the drawbacks.
Before we add information from 15 years ago, we assess whether it is still current and valuable. Your old computer skills might not be something to boast about in this age of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google. Similarly, years ago an employee who stayed put for decades was prized; now a higher value is placed on a variety of experience, with job changes every 4 to 5 years being the norm.
If your past experience is current and valuable, we might feature it in a Career Highlights section on the top of your resume. The section would contain all of your most relevant experience, regardless of dates.
Or we might add a Previous Experience section at the end of your resume where we do not detail dates, but list your title(s) and the company name(s) to show your career progression.
If you are applying for more senior positions, we might actually recommend showing more than 10 years of experience to emphasize the advantages of a long career.
We never downgrade your experience in hopes of qualifying you for a job. Would you hire someone to be your secretary if they had enough experience to be your boss?
Every job seeker’s situation is different. Part of my mandate as a professional resume writer is to help make your resume attractive to hiring managers. Contact me today.