Resume activity

Once you’ve had a few jobs, your resume can start to get repetitive.  That can make it blur together and in many cases make it longer than necessary.  On the other hand, the repetition means that you have core things you bring to any job, which is so important to communicate to a future employer.

Find a friend (or random person) and exchange resumes.  Then each of you take 5-10 minutes to read each other’s resumes and extract what you think their top 3-5 skills are. Only use what is in the resume, not what you know of them.

Then trade back.  Are you surprised?  Are those the things you wanted them to take away? If so, congrats.  Otherwise, now take some time to brainstorm what you want those top 3-5 things to be.

Once you have that list decide if you want to simply state those clearly at the top or if you want to rework the contents to focus on those areas.

I recommend doing this every few years.  As we evolve and learn, sometimes these shift.