In this week's "Reinvent" tip column for WSJ, Alexandra Levit provides a succinct plan for focusing career searches on passion-oriented skills. Identifying past examples where these skills created professional benefit through "Challenges-Actions-Results," as well as channeling the personal energy toward your passion with position-oriented "functional resumes," are excellent ways to invigorate a stagnant search or restart your pursuit of a better professional future.
I believe Levit will have more great articles to come. In the meantime, check out her blog.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
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I love that you highlighted this - it combines two of my favorite ideas, strength-based resumes and results-oriented descriptions. In my portfolio, I have a case studies section and use almost the exact same template (mine is situation, action, results) as Levit suggests.
ReplyDeleteOne caveat - I read Ask a Manager, which is written by a DC-based hiring manager. In a recent post http://tinyurl.com/d8f7ng, she explicitly says, "Don't use a functional resume" because she automatically assumes the candidate is trying to hide something.
I'm not a hiring manager or a career coach, so I don't know what advice to give someone who would, for appearance's sake, be better off going with a functional resume. Maybe the trick is to use the challenge-action-result format in the cover letter and include a chronological resume, even if it includes gaps.
With people changing jobs and/or careers 8 times on average before they're 30, I think having gaps in the resume will become less and less of a problem. I think the main point in the near future will be to prove you had impact everywhere you went. Then job shifting becomes a strong positive instead of a negative. You got in, had results, got out and moved onto something bigger and better. To me, it shows forward momentum and drive, not a lack of focus.
Kelly Giles
http://tarheelsintransit.wordpress.com
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