Resume Your Way to a New Career: The Career Summary Edition

Hey guys! I'm so excited about this three-part series on resume sections that often aren’t discussed in depth: the Career Summary, Key Skills, and Achievements sections. These sections should serve as highlighters of your career experience and skills. Consider them “career captions” in that they each describe your career and jobs in short snippets.

Let’s be real. A resume is essentially a sales document. It’s your opportunity to unabashedly sell your knowledge, skills, and expertise. This is NOT the time to be shy or humble. Show our prospective employer what you’ve done and how you can be an asset to their company. It’s time to werk it, dahling!

First things first. Your resume should be tailored to the position to which you’re applying. You should have a resume template (or templates, if you’re applying to different types of jobs) and tailor it to each specific position. There’s absolutely no acceptable reason for sending off the exact same resume for each job application. Nope. None. Nada. Don’t do it. Go back to “Go” and tailor that resume!

The Career Summary is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a summary of your career and the applicable skills and experience that you’d bring to the position. Below, I’ve included a Career Summary from one of my resumes to use as an example.

In your Career Summary, you should do a couple of things:

1. Give yourself some sort of title that allows the reader to quickly place you in the category of the job that you’re applying to. If your current or most recent positions have applicable titles, use one of those specific titles. If you’re looking for a position in the same field but not necessarily the same type of position, use the name of the field and a general descriptor such as “Human Resources Professional.”
   1. In the example below, the resume was for a legal position that wasn’t similar to the position I had at the time and that required the chosen applicant to be a licensed attorney.
2. Briefly describe your general experience, skills, and expertise. Then incorporate some of the wording in the position description in the summary. Here’s how I did those things in the example:
   1. General experience - Governmental, communication, analytical, and research experience
   2. Hard skills - Reviewing data and developing/implementing recommendations and strategies
   3. Soft skills - Collaborating with cross-functional teams to achieve and exceed organizational objectives
   4. Expertise - Analysis of documents for legal and financial relevance
   5. Incorporated language - Thrives on opportunities to create and implement solutions to complex issues. Excellent communicator, presenter, and independently driven team member

Taking the above basic formula and making it your own will go a long way in setting yourself apart from the other applicants. Yes, it’s going to take some work but it’ll be worth it. Not only does it give the reader a quick take on what they’re going to read further down in your resume but it’s a great starting place for formulating an answer to the dreaded “Tell us about yourself” interview question.

In the next installment, I’ll discuss the Key Skills section. Good luck and happy summarizing!

Tyche Tips

• Have a resume template and tailor it for each application.
• Use the Career Summary section to give the reader a quick take on what you’ve done well and on your areas of expertise.
• Make sure you match up your highlighted experience, skills, and expertise with what’s in the job description. Keywords and phrases matter!

If you think these tips are great but want someone else to implement them, shoot me an email at [email protected] so we can discuss my resume writing services, or check out my Services page at TycheCoaching.com to see how else I can help you during your career transition.