Diane's post brought back the agony that I went through when I had to redo my resume this past summer - by the time that it was all said and done I think that the whole thing took me well over a month. My previous resume was LONG gone on the hard drive of a long gone computer; fortunately the resume that landed me the life-changing job in Asia had been written by Sue Campbell, a wonderful resume writer who is infinitely more organized than I. I asked her to email me a copy and *poof*, there it was in my inbox. I opened it, looked at it, closed it and went to clean out my bathroom cabinets. :)
A couple of days (weeks) went by and I opened it again and started the process of adding the past 3 years of experience. But even with a model right in front of me (of my own resume no less), I couldn't spend more than 10 minutes without getting frustrated and walking away from it. Finally, with input from Husband, family, and friends I had enough *stuff* to fill out the questionnaire that Sue had sent me and quickly dropped it back in her lap to make me sound fabulous!
All told it took me about a month to get to that point - it's silly as I sit here thinking about it now but the paralyzation was vividly, painfully real at the time and now it's time to update it again, sigh. Writing this blog and getting to talk with all sorts of other women facing similar challenges has been incredibly cathartic for me - it's great to know I'm not alone, I mean I'm sorry for them and all but....you know what I mean.
We'll be talking with Sue this week to get some input and practical advice for rewriting, recreating, or just freshening up your resume. In the meantime, if you want to start some forward momentum or can't stand the idea of cleaning out those bathroom cabinets again, here are a couple ideas to get you moving:
1. Start small - just a rough list of all of your personal qualities (both good and "challenging") that you can think of. Don't forget to incorporate the items from your career in MomWorld that Diane identified in "Thoughts for the Interview". Now...ask husbands, friends, family members - only people who will be honest but not brutal. Live with your list for a couple of days - add to it but don't take anything off, we tend to edit ourselves way too much. It's your opportunity to brag, do it!
2. At the same time, especially if you're starting from scratch, start working on a VERY simple timeline of your career - dates, places, titles. It seems excessively easy but after a couple of years at home, I'm lucky if I can recall what I had for dinner last Tuesday, much less where I was and what I was doing in 1998.
3. Once you've identified the places/times that you worked, start sketching out the details of the jobs and responsibilities that you held while there. Again, this is the very simple 65,000 foot view of things, the bare bones.
Our expert, Sue Campbell of 1st-Writer, will give us some pointers on how to get from here to there later in the week, so we can start to pull all of this together.
We're going to do this together in baby steps, so....get off your ass, leave those cabinets alone, and get started!
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