How To Write a Resume's Career Summary

The Career Summary (sometimes called the Summary of Qualifications) is the most misunderstood components of a resume. Over the years, I've read summary statements that are short and boast about the candidate's team player ability. Other summary statements are mini-manifestos: long and meandering. How should a Summary be written? What's the purpose of a summary? Do you need one? These are the common questions I'll answer in this article.

Many people misunderstand the purpose of a Career Summary. While it seems rather obvious to me, it's not to many other people. So, let me define it: a career summary should summarize your resume's high points and reflect what the employer says it wants per the job ad. Not too difficult, right?

Not all resumes need a Career Summary. If you are an early career worker, you can go without a summary unless you have a specific set of skills that is relevant to the job opening you are applying to. For early workers, I usually opt for a Summary of Qualifications, which is a more basic list of job skills. Mid- or late-career workers should always have a Career Summary. By the time you've had 10 or more years of experience, your work life has gone through several cycles, industries or roles. The Career Summary gives a short "big picture" of this time period, as well as detailing the relevant skills desired for the job opening.

How do you write a Career Summary? It's a good question. My answer is: go to the job ad and see what the employer wants. Here's a job ad for an administrative assistant:

Basic Requirements

• Minimum of three years of secretarial/administrative experience, preferably in a legal environment.
• College degree or equivalent work experience.
• Excellent Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, Internet and PowerPoint skills; Access skills highly desirable.

Preferred Requirements

• Demonstrated oral communication, organizational, and writing skills.
• Ability to handle multiple projects, prioritize own work and exercise independent judgment.
• Ability to assess a situation and determine appropriate action in the absence of his/her supervisor.
• Ability to handle confidential information with discretion.

Let's reverse engineer these requirements to determine the categories of information the employer is seeking:

Basic Requirements:

1. Years of work experience in a specific work environment
2. Education
3. Computer skills

Preferred Requirements

1. Communications Skills
2. Project Management
3. Self-Directed 
4. Discreet

An effective Career Summary would contain these 7 pieces of information to reflect exactly what the employer is seeking. It could be written in the following way:

Career Summary

• 5 years of administrative office experience in a school environment. 
• Associates Degree in Office Technology
• Proficient with MS Office 2007
• Excellent verbal, written and public speaking skills including giving training to new employees
• Successfully managed projects in HR, Audio Visual and Curriculum Development areas
• Positive, upbeat and congenial person who takes ownership of a job to complete work on time
• Discreet person who respects managers, co-workers, students and visitors

This type of career summary of a resume is helpful to a recruiter who is trying to select candidates to call into the office for an interview. If the recruiter has to sift through your resume to find the years of experience or wade through the cliched terms such as "excellent team player," it only slows up the process. In essence, this structured Career Summary is all that a recruiter needs to select you as a viable candidate because it is a direct mirror of what the employer stated it want in the job ad.

Of course, a Career Summary for an administrative assistant is simpler to write than for an IT technician, for instance. But using the same process of going to the job ad and reviewing what the employer seeks, we can determine the categories of information that should appear in a technical career summary.

One caveat of writing Career Summaries is: don't overload with information and pack it with keywords. I have seen technical resumes where the career summary contained every computer language known to mankind! Yet, in the job narratives none of the keywords are used to explain how the candidate used these keyword skills to solve problems. A summary should be what it says it is: an overview of the resume that helps the resume reader absorb the salient information quickly.

How To Write a Resume When You Have No Job Experience

It boggles my mind that a college graduate would be allowed to graduate without an internship or some kind of practical experience on his record. I guess from the point of view of an academic institution the degree it awards should be all the new graduate needs to get an entry level job. But from the point of view of an employer who may receive hundreds of entry level resumes in job applications, a new college graduate without an internship or some kind of occupationally relevant experience (I'm not taking about fast food experience here) will not have as much hiring appeal as one who does.

As I write this blog entry, in my life as a job search consultant, I am working with a new graduate in accounting without an internship. He has received no interviews in the six months after graduation. Last year I worked with a chemical engineering graduate who chose to go to China and teach English instead of accepting an internship in chemical processing. While teaching English abroad is a noble thing to do and sounds like a great adventure, it isn't what prospective employers want to see on a resume. When he first contacted me, he said he was not getting any interviews. I asked him how his friends got their first jobs in chemical engineering upon graduation. Without hesitation, he said, "They were hired where they interned."

So, how do new graduates write their resumes if they have no internship or practicum in their field?  I've been asked this question a million times by new graduates. My first answer is: volunteer in an organization that needs your skills. My second answer is: sign up for temp jobs through online work platforms such as oDesk, eLance, or Vworker. These places hire people for very short periods of time and only care about what your skills not your work history. You can build up a work portfolio rather quickly. Then, go and look for a real job.

Writing a resume for someone who does not have any job experience is not as difficult as it sounds. Unfortunately, from what I have seen of resumes written with the guidance of college placement offices, the standard resume format is experienced-weighted. That is, most of the resume is filled up by an employment history. If you don't have a work history, good luck writing a resume with that format!

Let me get back to basics. What kind of raw information is described on a resume? They are:

• Knowledge: credentials and theory such as degrees, certifications, licenses, and areas where you have a lot of knowledge in.
• Skills: these are the job tasks that you can accomplish using the knowledge you have. fix a computer. give a flu shot (nurse), do a brake job, etc.
• Abilities: these are the work contexts that you could easily adapt to. office environment, cross-functional work team, lots of business travel, etc.

The above "raw" information is typically used in a standard resume format to describe your job experience. Call it the building blocks of a job history. But if you don't have a job history, you have to manipulate these building blocks in a different way (to fill up the page). Here is how the chemical engineering graduate used these building blocks to write his "no job experience" resume:

Areas of Chemical Engineering Knowledge

• Heat & Mass Transfer
• Transport Phenomena
• Thermodynamics
• Fluid Mechanics
• Statistical Process Control
• Computer Analysis/Simulation
• Material Science
• Experimental Lab Design

Core Competencies

Knowledge

• Knowledge and applications of aerospace transparencies.
• Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering.
• Basic understanding of chemical process engineering.
• Knowledge of laboratory and chemical safety procedures.

Skills

• Demonstrated leadership skills including accountability, results driven, integrity and trust.
• Excellent team participation skills.
• Microsoft Office, Word, Excel, PowerPoint.
• MATLAB
• SEM
• PRO II

Abilities

• Solving technical problems.
• Collaborate with cross-functional areas.
• Adapt to rapidly changing business priorities and assignments.
• Multi-task efficiently.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
• Willingness to travel for domestic and international assignments.

The above two sections take up about two-thirds of his resume. Add in the contact information and the education section and eighty percent of the resume is completed. Now, where did he get the terms in the Areas of Chemical Engineering Knowledge section? From the college course catalog for his major. In the Core Competencies section, he grouped his knowledge, skills and abilities in an expanded summary section. All in all, this type of resume emphasizes the building blocks of a job history, not the job history itself.

In the above example, the new graduate finally got hired. But it wasn't in chemical engineering per se. Rather, it was in an entry level chemistry position that required him to assist in experiments in a lab. This is one of the knowledge areas he listed in his Areas of Chemical Engineering Knowledge section of his resume.  This illustrates that if you have no job experience, your resume must focus on other things you do have: knowledge or skills.

How Jargon Can Help or Hurt a Resume

Jargon is specialized language used in a specific profession or industry. Medical terminology is a common type of jargon. Military jargon is another. Every industry has jargon. Jargon can help or hurt a resume's communication as well as search-ability in a resume database so it's good to know when and how to use it.

How does jargon affect a resume? For recruiters who do not understand the jargon, the resume can read like ancient hieroglyphics with few if any of them understanding what it is being communicated -- not a result a job seeker wants to happen! But for the right audience, jargon can speed communication and make it more effective. In the age of online recruitment, jargon has one more purpose: it is a ripe source of unique keywords; recruiters can use a phrase of jargon to search through hundreds of resumes to find a candidate of interest. In other words, jargon can improve a resume's database visibility.

When job seekers use jargon on a resume, they should seek a balance between the communication of unique skills as expressed by the jargon and the oversimplification of language that would eliminate the jargon altogether in the faux pursuit of clear communication. Let me give an example of the latter case.

In this example, a military veteran placed the following on her resume to describe her military experience:

• Secure classified documents to maintain proper accountability
• Managed receipts of logs, inventories, files
• Prepared military correspondence and documents for superiors
• Delivered personal mail in garrison and tactical environment

Since she removed the military jargon from the description of duties, most people would be able to understand what she did in the Army.  Yet, what remains is uninspiring language that describes skills anyone with a high school student could do. This veteran eliminated the benefits of military jargon so much she destroyed the positive and differentiating value of her military service.

Now, let's look at an example of how to use military jargon to improve a resume:

Example A

• Execute daily requests and track all ASR/AMRs via Secret Internet Protocol Router (SIPR) and Secret Voice over Internet Protocol (SVOIP) requiring access to SECRET classified information.

Example B

• INSPECTIONS / INVESTIGATIONS: Surveyed of mission essential and vulnerable areas (MEVAs) including arms, ammunition and explosives, and material/strategic supplies of US Army installations and activities on mainland Japan.

Example A includes quite a bit of jargon. But this military veteran (i) defined most of the jargon and (ii) crafted the statement in such a way that some readers can determine what he did. For the target audience who knows this jargon, the statement is very clear. Had he reduced it down to "Fulfilled daily requests of classified information" the value of the jargon would have been removed.

Example B improves on example A by providing an inline sub-head (i.e., Inspections/Investigations) that defines the subsequent statement. In essence, this veteran realized he had two audiences to communicate to so he wrote this statement for both the general reader and the target audience who understands the jargon.

Information Technology is another industry that is ripe with jargon. Here are a few examples:

Example 1

• Our team has decomposed the company's Regatta PLM process while embracing the Pragmatic Marketing framework to realign the skills, connections, and talent we have for NPD and Portfolio Management.

Example 2

• Full-blown PPM tools when applied to PML process did not provide the agility needed for rapid cycle, agile development. Evaluated Product Planning Management (PPM) tools but after detailed analysis we adopted a set of in-house tools for product development planning based on Microsoft collaboration and analytic products.

Example 1 contains two types of jargon: acronyms, such as NPD, and intra-industry denotations such as "decomposed" and "embraced." Acronyms are the most common and easiest to deal with -- simply define them. But new meanings or denotations for common terms is more difficult to deal with. As used here, "decomposed" refers to breaking down into its component parts to better understand the process to improve on it. Example 2 contains two sentences. The first sentence is jargonistic on both levels, while the latter sentences explains what they did in everyday language. The best solution for these instances of jargon is to define, preview and explain for both the general reader and the target audience.

Jargon can both help and hurt a resume. But it can also enrich the resume with a deeper level of keywords not on most resumes. Therefore, it can dramatically improve a resume's visibility for those people who use jargon to source candidates. In the end, the management of jargon is understanding that your resume has multiple audiences. Taking the time to write to both the everyday reader and the subject matter expert who knows the jargon can improve the effectiveness of your resume.

Tips on Posting a Resume to an Online Database

At some point, all job seekers will need to post their resume online whether it be for a job application, social recruiting site or a job board. On the face of it, the task of posting it online sounds rather easy. Click, upload and your done! Well, it's not always that easy. For example, sometimes the resume database software does not populate the fields of the database correctly. Nearly all resume databases allow you to manually check and modify your resume posting after uploading. But I have seen a few corporate career sites that appear to have been built in-house and don't offer the option to correct errors that occurred during resume uploads, but these are rare.

So, how do you post your resume online such that your career information is visible and your resume is frequently part of a recruiter's search results? This is the salient question for any job seeker who is not getting the callbacks that he or she expects. Remember, a resume database exists not only to keep track of the thousands or millions of potential job candidates, but also as a competitive ranking system. If your resume information has been posted in such a manner that it has a low ranking relative to other resumes in the database, your resume will be "invisible" and naturally receive fewer callbacks by recruiters.

Here are some tips of how to post your resume to a database so it is most visible in recruiters searches:

1. Completely fill out the resume profile. There are two types of resume databases: (1) resume is parsed and the career information is inputted into a single profile, or (2) resume is uploaded for viewing and downloads by the recruiter and a separate profile must be completed manually. The second option is how Monster.com has structured its resume database. If you only upload your resume to Monster without completing the profile, you will get few if any "saves."

2. Enter your keywords in the job title field. CareerBuilder used to indicate below the Job Title field of its resume database that this field is "what the employers will see when they perform a resume database search." In other words, this is one of the primary ways the software determines how to rank your resume. I have experimented with entering a personal name, a job title only, and a long list of keywords into the job title field on CareerBuilder. I have always found the personal name gets fewer searches than the long list of keywords. In addition, the most popular keywords are software or technical terms so make sure to include in your keyword string all your software skills with each separated by a comma. This will increase the likelihood of it being part of the search results.

3. Current job should match the job title field. Resume database software universally places the most emphasis on your current or most recent job. This is a departure from the pre-Internet days where years of experience ruled the day. Now, I am not suggesting that your years of experience are unimportant. I'm not. But, for a moment, think like an employer and a coder of resume database software. Employers assume that your freshest skills are the ones you currently use, not the ones you used 5 or 10 years ago. So, they would like to find someone for an open position who has recently been in the same type of position because they will be able to make an impact to the work team immediately (and without training or orientation). The coder will respond to this philosophy by ensuring the most current or recent job has greater ranking value than earlier jobs. And, in situations where both the most recent job (ex. Customer Service Manager) and job title keywords match (ex. Customer Service Manager, MS Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, etc.), the software will rank your resume higher and make it more "visible."

4. Break out different positions in the same company. If you have worked for one company over 10 or 15 years and held several positions within that company, make sure to separate each position as a separate employer. If you group all these positions into a single employer entry, you will decrease your ranking because you will rob yourself of keyword data. This is a big problem with military veterans. If a military veteran is a retiree who has 20 years of experience from the U.S. Army and places it in one employer entry, his or her resume will be essentially invisible in resume searches because the recruiter sees only the last job and not the person's entire career path.

5. Be creative about detailing your skills. All resume databases have a skills section. Since recruiters use either the job title or skills to search databases, you should also make sure you have a detailed list of skills. Start with your computer software or computer skills. Then, go into skills about roles (ex. project management, budgeting, etc.) and finally get creative and add types of equipment, writing, or other specific aptitudes that may not be commonly listed. This will also improve your ranking.