Writing a resume can be a tedious, almost painful task as you decide how much or how little to share with a potential employer. Developing a resume becomes even more challenging if you are transitioning to a new career and need to demonstrate how your past experience aligns perfectly with the job description, even if the comparison might be a stretch of the imagination.
You try to make a good argument and showcase your qualifications. For the most part, almost all skills are transferrable. Of course, a transition resume is probably one of many resumes you have written. More than likely, you need a resume for your future career, and a resume for something in your current line of work (in case the transitions doesn’t work), and then a resume for your diverse career path because your next position could be one of many roles you played in the past. The variety of resumes are endless and when you are not getting a response from posting your resume to a position, you revise, and reformat, and repeat the process over and over again. Each rewrite is met with less enthusiasm than the previous one. You work long and hard on writing resumes and suddenly you realize you can now add another skill to your resume:
- Experienced resume writer
A while back when I was between careers, I recall having about ten different resumes and when an opportunity appeared, I was ready. However, with every opportunity I still had to alter one of my resumes to fit the job description, change key words to found by scanners, and wiggle around my accomplishments so I appear to be the most qualified. With all of the pre-work, I was exhausted before I even sent out the resume. What I was trying to do with each resume is sell my value to an organization through my experience, accomplishments, and qualities. I expected a potential employer to extract value from between the bullet points of job responsibilities, record breaking accomplishments, and years of experience. My attention was always on what I did, when I did it, and who I did it for. That is, until I realized that the value I was seeking was not in the past or who I was. Instead the value is the present, the value is who I am.
With this purpose in mind, writing a resume becomes a reflective exercise instead of a list of job descriptions. The value in a value-driven resume is it serves a dual purpose. Not only are you clearly communicating value to an organization, you are also making a bold statement to yourself about how truly unique you are and what sets you apart from the hundreds of other candidates. The focus of a value-driven resume is on three of the most important benefits for a potential employer: character, talent, and skills. Each of these values are YOU, not the positions held, not the companies you worked for, not the environment where you performed. When defining YOU as the value, the emphasis is placed on your character, who you are and how you consistently perform; talent, your natural strength, and the gift you possess and utilize effortlessly to accomplish great things; and skills, the outcome of persistence, years of toil and grind, and diligence.
Unlike the pain-staking task of writing multiple resumes and deciding which accomplishment, job title, or expertise is appropriate for the posted position, writing one value-driven resume feels good. That is because the bulleted statements you create for a value-driven resume come from a much deeper place within you. The core values identified can easily be demonstrated in your numerous accomplishments for you and your next employer to see. The outcome of a value-driven resume is greater focus on what truly matters, a sense of who you are, and an opportunity to be one of kind among the vast majority of boring, unfocused, unexciting resumes. Your values have always driven your success and now your resume can drive your values directly to the perfect job fit and create a win-win for you and an organization.
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