Updating your resume, Part 2

Last week recruiting expert Phil Sullivan offered advice for setting up the top of your resume – your basic layout, contact information and professional summary.

This week, we look at the rest of your document. After the contact information and professional summary comes your technology summary, which should list the technologies with which you’re familiar. When it comes to deciding whether to include old technologies you know, such as Windows 95 or NetWare 3.0, this is the place to list them, rather than later in the document.

Next, you can detail your education, particularly if it’s apropos to your profession or to the job for which you’re applying.

Then you’ll enter into a reverse chronological listing of the positions you’ve held, giving the most attention and detail to the past five years. In this section you’ll list your specific duties and accomplishments. “Think about not what you did as much as what you accomplished,” Sullivan says. Bullets are great, making it much easier to read than text in paragraph form. Bullets also make it easier to rearrange your resumes for different audiences and jobs, Sullivan notes.

Once you’ve detailed the past five years, you can cover the previous five to 10 years with a shorter writeup with much less detail. Anything prior to the past 15 years you can list in a category, “Other Professional Experience Included,” which would feature one-sentence, quick-hit-type explanations.

If you changed jobs frequently over the past five years – and many have – give the past five years of chronological job listings particular attention. If you had to switch jobs frequently because of mergers and acquisitions, say so, such as “90% layoff, company went out of business.”

If you were job hopping for fun and profit, it’s hard to disguise that fact, Sullivan says, and it may play against you. In that case you may want to consider crafting a functional resume. In a functional resume instead of a chronological listing of jobs you’ve held, you would have a category called “Programming experience” or “Management experience,” for example. You also may want to include a category, “Employed by the following companies.”

Sullivan says many people also want to list awards and activities on their resumes. “I would recommend they do it as long as it is related to the profession, and put them at the end,” he says.