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More Resume Resources |
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How to Explain Gaps in
Your Resume
by Tony Jacowski
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Gaps in your qualifications or experience raise
alarm bells with prospective employers and require a convincing explanation
in order to convince the employer that you are the ideal candidate.
Reasons for Gaps in Your Resume
• You may have had to drop out of a course for person reasons like ill
health, financial constraints or personal commitments. It is worse if you
were 'made' to drop out of a course for non-performance, lack of aptitude or
insufficient knowledge. Your prospective employer will closely examine the
reason for the break in your qualifications. They need to see that the same
conditions do not persist and are not likely to affect your job performance
• Non-Performance or sub-standard job performance. Performers are
marketable. Non-performers are not. A prospective employer needs to be
convinced that you have taken adequate steps (through additional training or
self-improvement courses to overcome challenges).
• Leaving a job for 'personal reasons' could be the biggest nightmare -
especially if these pertain to what you perceived as discriminatory or
unfair treatment or if you had personal commitments that affected your job
performance. These reasons will be examined closely to see if they had any
substance or basis. Discipline or personality problems could be a nightmare
for a prospective employer.
Having gaps in your resume is no reason for you to be doomed to underpaying,
unsatisfactory jobs. Your ability to rewrite your resume to convince a
prospective employer that you have circumvented or tackled the problems you
have faced, will be crucial in getting a good job that will rebuild your
resume.
• Show the time spent on the job in terms of years, (i.e. show the year you
started the job and the year you left). Do not specify the month. This will
help hide a few months of unemployment, though this could easily be exposed
through a couple of focused questions by the interviewer.
• Have a good explanation for breaks in your education or career, especially
if it was time off to do things like fund-raising or raising children or
traveling. Try and project these breaks as breaks that helped build your
qualifications, experience or personality, such as mind broadening travel or
an internship abroad. Don't let your prospective employer assume that it was
laziness, bad habits, an unsteady personality or lack of commitment or
ambition.
• Don't let your resume reflect the opposite (i.e. too many jobs). Rapid
job- hopping or a variety of jobs will reflect a personality that is not
able to settle down or a personality that has no focus. Commitment and focus
is what potential employers are looking for.
• Highlight pertinent experience: focus your resume in such a way that you
highlight the experience that is pertinent to the job for which you are
applying. Noting your experience in years rather than months will also help
to focus on your skills rather than your experience. Erase any jobs that
were for too short a term, especially if they gave you experience that is
not required in the job that you are applying for.
• Highlight qualifications, especially if you can connect them to the job
that you are seeking. Emphasize your professional qualifications rather than
your conventional qualifications. Additionally, emphasizing skills over
experience will also help your resume.
• Do not lie or gloss over a bad past. The world is a small place and HR
departments tend to have an unspoken agreement between them to be honest
about why an employee left. Your glossing over reasons for unemployment can
easily be cross-checked. Your resume does not need to have a detailed
explanation for the gap in your career, but you should try and give it a
positive or attractive twist.
Explaining gaps in your resume is not easy because the element of truth
should be maintained, yet your resume should still identify you as a viable
candidate. Follow the tips above and you will be successful.
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Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta
Solutions - Six Sigma Online - [http://www.sixsigmaonline.org]http://www.sixsigmaonline.org,
offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma,
black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tony_Jacowski http://EzineArticles.com/?How-To-Explain-Gaps-In-Your-Resume&id=917298
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