Career History – Reverse Chronological
At this point your resume probably looks something like this:
Now we’re finally getting to the main section of the resume: your career history.
A lot of people think that a resume is nothing more than a list of jobs you’ve held. Well, as you’ve seen in the previous chapters, that’s not true. A resume should also have sections that focus on promoting your professional brand in an eye catching and efficient way. These were the summary/objective and skills/qualifications/accomplishments sections. They were short sections. Almost like advertising slogans. They were designed to catch the eye and give quick, important data but not really be comprehensive.
But now we’re getting down to the meat of the resume. So brevity is right out. Now we will be comprehensive. The career history is the actual list part of the resume. This next section will be a list of the jobs you’ve held and the things you achieved in your career.
Yes, we are going to list your jobs. And we’re going to do so in a reverse chronological order, which means we list your most recent job first, and you oldest job last.
Why do we do reverse chronological?
Because your career history (like your resume in general) should tell a story- the story of your career. And that story should (hopefully) be an impressive, inspiring tale of increasing responsibilities, accumulating skills and expanding and impressive accomplishments. So in this story, it’s best to start at the end… with your most recent job. Hopefully, your career has been evolving from, say, a lowly mail room clerk 20 years ago… to your most recent position where we can see that you’ve blossomed into a well-rounded and respected professional.
So you’ll list your most recent job first and your oldest job last. That way your most impressive job comes first, and your least impressive job comes last.
Hopefully your most recent jobs have your best accomplishments and most impressive details. In fact, you should try to organize it that way. Try to write the most about your most recent jobs. When you get further back in time, you don’t have to say as much. You can write less about each job, the further back you go in time. In fact, if you have a 30 year career, then really, you don’t have to say much about that internship way back when that got you started three decades ago. In fact, sometimes when I’m doing a client’s resume, I’ll just list the oldest jobs without describing them in any way: just list the job title, the company and the dates. And that’s it. The way, way-back past is simply not as important as the recent past. This is very much a look-at-what-I’ve-done-lately exercise. I’ve even been known to leave out some way olden-times jobs completely if I feel they’re that unimportant.
So let’s get writing! Again, let’s make a Section Title. Let’s call it what it is: Career History. Again, center it, make it bold and 14pt.
Now, the whole rest of your career history is going to be normal sized text, 11pt. or 12pt. Use 10pt. if you feel you need the space, but don’t go any smaller than that.
Let’s start with your most recent job.
First, list the job title. Make this bold and underlined.
Then, list the company. Bold the company name but don’t underline.
Finally, list the dates employed. Make this be regular sized text. Some people like to use month and year, but just listing years only would be more than fine.
So, for your first job, you should have something like this:
You’ll do the same thing for each job you list. For later jobs, you would list the dates accordingly: 2003-2007. If you went with the month-year format, then it would look like this: May 2003-June 2007.
Hopefully there are no big gaps in the chronology: one job should lead into another seamlessly. That’s why I’m not a fan of including months in the dates. What if you left your job in June 2007, but didn’t get your next job until November of 2007? Why leave that gap in there? If you just list the years, then for all anyone knows, you left one job in 2007 and you got the next one in 2007. No one has to know or even wonder about about the months in between.
What about the City and State (in other words, the location) of the job in question? Some people like to include this. Sometimes it’s important, even crucial. It depends on the job. You can add the city and state if you feel it’s necessary. But it’s not the biggest deal in the world if you leave it out.
So now, under these job titles comes the important part: the job description. And I have some very specific views on how you should structure your job descriptions. There’s a format that I absolutely think works best. Let me discuss that in the next chapter.