Crafting a stellar career summary for your resume
Digital Marketing

Crafting a stellar career summary for your resume

Are you a career changer? Or are you satisfied with your stable career but interested in updating your resume? Are you a professional who has tried different things but you are still looking for the type of work that best suits you? Whatever your career situation, what your resume needs most is a stellar career summary.

What difference can a career summary make to you? Here are 4 reasons why you need one in his resume:

1.) A career summary communicates more about you and does so more powerfully than a mission statement.

2.) Employers love career summaries and use them to preview your resume. If they like your resume, they are more likely to read your entire resume.

3.) A resume does a superlative job of masking weaknesses in your employment history (too much experience, too little, too many different types of jobs, employment gaps, ineffective titles, and whatever else you can think of).

4.) A career summary tells the employer what you most want them to know, up front. So it sells you well and sets you up to be asked the kind of interview questions you really want to be asked.

Alright, so a career summary is a good thing. How does it look? A summary can be a short paragraph of 2-4 sentences, or a short sentence or sentence presenting a series of 4-8 bullet points, depending on your preferred communication style. It may be preceded by a job title or a list of specialty areas you want highlighted. The summary forever goes to the top of the resume immediately after your name and contact information.

In general, a good career summary will outline a combination of the following types of critical details:

  • A brief description of the breadth and scope of your experience.
  • Academic credentials, if applicable
  • 3-5 skill sets that set you apart from the competition
  • 3-5 personality characteristics that describe the workplace in which you work
  • Advice on your most important work-related values.

Well, that all sounds good, but what does a career summary look like? Here are two different versions of a summary that you can play around with and make your own:

Career and Workforce Development Manager

Coaching… Training and development… Program design

Experienced, eloquent and visionary professional with over 19 years of experience in all facets of career and career development in corporate and social service environments. Possess excellent verbal, written and interpersonal communication skills and an inherent ability to build effective and cohesive teams. Deeply value creativity and lifelong learning.

Experienced, eloquent and visionary professional with more than 19 years of proven experience in:

  • Career development
  • Workforce Development
  • Corporate Consulting
  • delivery of social services
  • Teamwork
  • program design
  • lifelong learning
  • communications

The key is to start by brainstorming solid content. Choose your descriptive language carefully. Make every word count. Create content first; write a draft second. Then share your draft with others you trust before finalizing it for your resume.

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