How long should your resume be?
I’ve addressed this topic before, but I thought it was worth a re-visit in light of the Great Resignation. If you’re looking for a new job, one of your first tasks will be retooling your resume.
So let’s start with a basic point: unless you’re in academia, medicine, or the federal government, you’re going to want a fairly short resume.
How short, you ask?
In general, you want to be aiming for 1-2 pages, depending on how much relevant experience you have. But “relevant” can be a bit confusing, so it’s your call. If you can see how one piece of older experience translates well to something you want now, you get to call it relevant! And lots of tasks we do at work are transferrable from one job to another. If you’ve taught adult education, for instance, think about how that looks like the training your hoped-for position talks about. If you’ve been in higher ed., your Banner experience can easily swap in for Salesforce, as long as you define Banner as a CRM and give it a little more context. Other transferrable skills include things like researching, coordinating, designing, organizing, and so forth.
So the rule, to my mind, is that if you feel you can’t adequately capture what you’ve done accomplished in one page, aim for 2, but plan to fill up that second page.
And if you’re struggling to fill even one page, reach out! We can talk. You have done more than you are giving yourself credit for.
