Hiring Technical People

Resume Tip #3: Summarize experience on a resume cover page

March 10th, 2003

You know you’re supposed to keep your resume to two pages. But you’ve been working for 20+ years, and you have lots of great experience. Instead of pages and pages of the chronological resume, think about the kinds of things you’ve done in your work. Have you rescued projects? Have you facilitated strategic planning? Have you been a certain kind of functional manager several times? Group that kind of functional experience on a resume cover page, without specifics. Here’s how I do it for my resume:Project Rescue for Floundering Projects

- Analysis, prioritization, and initial definition of project management for floundering projects. Defined and implemented lightweight processes for project success. 

- Analysis, definition, and implementation of program management, project management, and SQA management to bring out-of-control projects to beta and release, and the organizations into some semblance of order. 

- Extensive experience in project and program management

If you want to see more examples, my online “brief resume” is this cover page.Then in the body of my resume, I show the reverse chronological experience. I only go back about 12 years, the rest of the experience is summarized.An experience-grouping cover sheet helps hiring managers see if your experience correlates with their needs without making them read a 14-page resume.

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