Although your resume will be a chronological listing of the jobs you have held, you want to highlight the experiences that contribute to explaining who you are and what you want – experiences that demonstrate you are qualified for your dream job.
Lila’s Story
Lila is a sales manager for a large electronics distributor. She has a successful record of accomplishment of inside and outside sales. She wants to update her resume because she is afraid her job is at risk.
Her resume and LinkedIn profile were not bad. She has a nice picture and all the required LinkedIn elements to get started: a decent number of contacts and groups. She had highlighted the skills that would get her attention as a sales manager.
Nevertheless, Lila does not want to be a sales manager any longer. She wants to be a trainer. She loves to create curriculum and design and deliver training programs that support leaders’ efforts to grow and business’s efforts to improve profitability. This information was neither present nor visible in her current resume.
After long discussions about her responsibilities, we could see that Lila was a very good trainer. She has plenty of experience and plenty of demonstrated results. However, the job titles and experiences she chose in her current resume supported sales management, not training.
Lila told us about the training programs she created and delivered, identified the problems that those programs addressed, and described the results achieved by the people she trained. All this information supports her skill and justifies her transition into a new field. Once we identified this information, the resume was easy to transform.
- We put Lila’s titles, jobs, and dates in chronological order.
- We inserted her goal, Training Director, at the top of the resume so everyone looking at the resume could see Lila wanted a position as a Training Director.
- We adjusted all bullets describing Lila’s accomplishments to reflect achievements from training she delivered rather than her sales achievements. We did not discuss her sales results because those results are no longer relevant to her chosen role as Training Director.