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Resume Tips for Executives and Managers
Business leaders have special resume needs.A challenge in writing a resume for an experienced company officer is selecting, from an abundance of experience, the right information to display in a resume for a person's career goals, particularly when the appearance of "being overqualified" can be a handicap in a competitive job market.
Company leaders not only have more career-related experience but also tend to have multiple skills that have been put to work in a greater range of experience. For example, a person who is currently an entrepreneur as the owner and president of a new company might have been a regional sales manager who was also a vice president and who started out not in sales but as an engineer or as an accountant.
The resume-writing challenge here is determining which experiences to emphasize and which to downplay. A related task is knowing what to exclude. Some business leaders want to include "everything," but it is important to present only the most important information on one or two pages.
Resume tips for executives and managers:
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1. |
If your resume
has an Objective statement, make it focused, interesting,
and unique so that it grabs the reader's attention. |
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2. |
If you can
sell yourself better with some other kind of section,
consider omitting an Objective statement and putting
a Summary of Qualifications, a Profile, or an Areas
of Expertise section just after the contact information. |
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3. |
A Profile can
replace an Objective statement if you mention the target
field in a subheading for the Profile. |
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4. |
Making a
Qualification Summary long helps to position important
information at the top of the first page. |
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5. |
Listing
Qualifications (or Areas of Expertise, or Skills) in
columns makes them easy to alter when your target is
a different job or industry. |
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6. |
Spend considerable
time determining how you present your skills. You might
present them under one or more of the following
headlines: Areas of Expertise, Certifications, Computer
Skills, Demonstrated Strengths, Key Skills, Leadership
Abilities, Professional Capabilities, Specialties,
Technical Proficiency/Certification, or Technical Skills. |
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7. |
In the Experience
section or elsewhere, state achievements, not just duties
or responsibilities. Achievements can be attention-getting. |
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8. |
In the Experience
section and for each position held, consider explaining
responsibilities in a brief paragraph and using bullets
to point to achievements. |
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9. |
When you indicate
achievements, consider boldfacing them, quantifying them,
or providing a separate heading for them. |
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10. |
When skills,
abilities, and qualifications are varied, group them
according to categories for easier comprehension. |
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11. |
To tell something
about a company where you have worked, try explaining
the company name. |
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12. |
Group positions
to avoid repetition in a description of duties. |
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13. |
Play up experience
and on-the-job training to offset a lack of higher education. |
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14. |
Contact information
given also at the end of a resume makes it easier for the
reader to phone the applicant. |
From Professional Resumes for Executives, Managers, and Other Administrators, by David F. Noble, Ph.D., © 1998. Used with permission of JIST Publishing, Inc.
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