The rule of thumb for resumes today is to spend valuable resume space on no more than 10 years of your career history, whether that involves 1 position or 5 or more. Professionals with longer careers can indicate their older roles and companies briefly at the end of the resume in an “Additional Roles” section, and offer details on request. But what should you do if one of those older roles is relevant to your current job search? Perhaps that role was in an industry you’re currently targeting, or involved tasks you’d like to pick up again in a new position. Here are 3 strategies for how to highlight that role on your resume — without bogging down your most current information.
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job search
Spend money on your resume — a simple one- or two-page document? How could a stranger possible write about your background and achievements? For many people, the idea of having a resume professionally written seems like a waste of money — or, at best, an expense that will get you a questionable product. If you’re among these naysayers, we’ll be blunt — you couldn’t be more wrong. A professionally written resume is one of the very best investments you can make in your job search. Here are a few things a professional resume writer can do for you:
1. Provide outstanding writing skills
Though a resume isn’t supposed to be a work of literary merit, it’s essential that your resume is grammatically correct, free from spelling and punctuation errors, and written in a dynamic, compelling style. A professional resume writer is not only a grammar expert — he or she is also highly skilled in selecting exciting language and phrasing that will make you stand out from the pack. Don’t mistake such skills for lying or exaggerating — a professional resume writer never fabricates or aggrandizes your work. Instead, he or she takes what you’ve done and writes about it in the most effective possible way.
Face it: You’re just a human resource, one of six billion from the rapidly multiplying species known as homo sapiens.
Okay, for whatever job you’re going for, you’re probably not in competition with six billion—but there are probably a thousand, maybe several thousand, and possibly tens of thousands of folks well-qualified and interested in the job you, too, are after. So what makes you different?
Understanding Your Brand
Your brand consists of a vision, purpose, goals, values, and passions. The vision is the big picture view of how your work serves the world. Maybe it’s for a world with a solar panel on every roof, or an energy grid that tells people how to save energy, or a carbon-neutral world.
Following the money isn’t just a great way to track corruption to its source. It’s also a solid job search strategy.
And it can be a particularly effective way to find a job in industries, like clean tech, where most companies are somewhere in the start-up phase.
Who’s Getting the Dough
Green media sites like Greentech Media, CleanEdge, and CleanTechies regularly publish articles about who’s investing in whom. When a venture capital firm puts money into a start-up, some of that dough will pay people’s salaries. So by tracking venture capital investments, you can get a pretty good idea about companies in your focus area that are likely to be opening job requisitions soon. Then you can target your networking to try to get to know some people at that company.