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.