Monday, April 24, 2023

Riffing on Resumes, Part 12: Skills

A functional resume allows you to resurrect skills that you have used well in the past, that you have continued developing despite working in a job that does not allow you to use the skill, and that you want a prospective employer to know you want to use. 

Instead of writing a chronological resume listing your skills under a heading called Experience, you might want the employer to know you bring three skills to the organization: analytical and communication, which you have used in your past two jobs, and project management, which you used before those two jobs. If you want to highlight those three skills, pack the bullet points of your work career under the three skills, starting with Project Management, rather than using a chronological listing, where project management will get lost.

Even if you choose a chronological resume, you should reflect on the two or three or four skills you bring to a job so that you can etch them in the interviewer's mind.