A Functional Resume Vs. A Chronological Resume
If you’ve done your research about resumes, you may have heard about different formats. The two most common resume formats are the Functional Resume and the Chronological Resume.
I’m going to show you a resume format that is a bit of a hybrid between the two. Let’s call what we’re about to write a Combination Resume format.
But just so you understand, let me briefly touch on the two formats and what they entail.
In a functional resume, you de-emphasize your career chronology. Sure, you list your jobs and employers and dates and all of that. But you put more emphasis on other things. A functional resume might have sections like: Skills, Accomplishments, even Core Competencies. And it might have several of them. These would be given precedence over the career history. With a functional resume the idea is that your jobs and titles aren’t as important as giving an overall impression of who you are as a professional.
Functional resumes are often utilized by students and people who don’t have much of a career history and thus need to show they’re well rounded without being able to point to a long career. But they’re also used by some executives.
A chronological resume is where you basically lay out your career history, job by job, usually going in reverse chronological order, with the most recent job listed first and the earliest (or least impressive) jobs listed toward the end. The idea behind a chronological resume is to show your career progression as a sort of narrative, emphasizing increasing skills, experience and accomplishments.
As I said, the resume we’re going to sit down to write in a few posts will be a bit of both. But let me show you a functional resume and a chronological resume example so you know what I’m talking about:
A Functional Resume Format
This is a functional resume format. Notice the qualifications and career highlights are broken out as separate bulleted lists. The career history is still there, in reverse chronological order, but the details of each job are de-emphasized. In fact, each job only gets a couple of bullets of description. This is because the emphasis is on the overall scope of experience, not the jobs in particular.
A Chronological Resume Format
This is a chronological resume format. Notice that the career history is outlined in reverse chronological order, with the most recent job first. The vast majority of this resume is the career history, in greater detail.