Employers potentially work about resume gaps because they don’t know you yet and can’t tell why you’ve taken time away from the workforce. But you know you, and you know that your unpaid time wasn’t so that you could lie on your couch, watch soap operas, and eat Doritos. So how should you tell your story?
You have a couple of options here. One is to address the gap in your resume, filling the time you were unpaid with information about what you were doing—volunteering, taking classes, elder care, etc. If you choose this approach, simply list the info in the same way you list your work experience. I recommend a job (or course of studies) title in boldface, the organization name, and the date range, followed by bullet points about what you did. You can use this if you’ve taken time away to be a parent, as well, but I don’t especially like “Stay-home parent” as a job title (some people do!) so I recommend talking more about things like volunteering with the PTA and that sort of thing instead. (Again, though, this is completely a matter of opinion, so if you really like having your parenting info on the document, by all means put it on there!)
Option two is to tell your story in a cover letter. This is a more narrative approach, and will obviously not work if you’re in an industry in which cover letters aren’t standard, so use with caution. That said, if you’ve taken time off for personal reasons like a health or mental health issue, this may be a better approach for you because “self-care” doesn’t make for a particularly good resume point.
If you decide to use approach #2, work to tell your story in a way that isn’t going to cause concern to a potential employer. Don’t feel you need to give a lot of detail, and point out the positives as much as you can: “I was fortunate enough to be able to take time off work for personal reasons, and now that those reasons are resolved, I am excited to start using my skills in ____ and ____ again, to _____ [something from the job description].” If you want, you can have a more detailed version of this story to tell during an interview, but you don’t need to. This is a good approach to use if you’ve been traveling, as well, and you can use the rest of the paragraph to talk about where you went and if you had any particularly interesting experiences.
Regardless, your goal is to minimize any concern your potential employers are likely to have based on a period of time spent outside the paid workforce. So approach with that in mind and then decide how you want to tell your story. After all, it’s yours to tell!
