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Submitted by orioniv on
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Hi all

I have not found a padcast nor found it mentioned in the Resume Workbook so I'll give it a try to the forum.

BLUF: When you have had many positions, e.g. inside the same company, it takes up a lot of the space on a 1 page resume as the administrative part and the responsibilities takes room away from accomplishments bullets.

Are there any guidance from the forum-members or M-T about how to best deal with this challenge?

In my specific example, I have had 13 positions of each using a minimum of 2 lines (describing job-title, company and responsibilities) and with 3 lines needed for 3 educations. So these together takes up 29 lines at a minimum. I'm also using narrow page margins in top/bottom in MS word with contact info up in header as recommended and font size 10pt for Times New Roman for all text with 6pt spacing after paragraphs and using single line spacing, This leaves 26 lines (or less) for all accomplishments, which is no more than 2 accomplishments per position in average. Trying to avoid positions having no accomplishments at all (even oldest jobs) makes it hard to have more than 3 or 4 accompishments for any job.

Cheers
Lars

flexiblefine's picture

13 positions on one page does sound like a lot, but how much time do those 13 positions represent? If a job is 10 or 15 years old (or more), how relevant will it be to your next position?

I wouldn't worry if the oldest positions on the bottom of the resume have one accomplishment each, or even none. Just make sure you are including the most relevant duties and accomplishments overall. Recent ones will be more relevant that older ones, simply because they are recent.

orioniv's picture
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Hi flexiblefine

Thanks for your input. I agree that the oldest jobs may not need accomplishments, in my case they were odd jobs before my real career took off. I also have limited the older jobs to a single relevant accomplishment each to have more space for the more recent jobs. I have many position changes within the same company, especially due to organizational changes where teams were merged or split, so to be truthful I have them all listed as they were new teams with changing responsibilities.

Yet it is still a challenge with many jobs to have room for accomplishments and somewhat detailed descriptions of responsibilites. Hoping Mark or Wendii would comment... /Lars

BrenF's picture

You said there were many position changes within a single company. Why not begin "blocking" certain time frames and writing longer descriptions. A resume should show off both what you did, and what you accomplished, it should give a complete view of your responsibilities. It doesnt really matter if that responsibility may have only been yours for a few months, regardless, it was a responsibility and function of your job and you acquired the skill  to apply that. Maybe if you have say 10 "changes" at this one company, just break that into 2-4 sections within one company, with bigger desciptions.

With that you can write in accomplishments for that block of responsibilities, say a team changed three times and your time in that team changed, it is only relevant of what the team accomplished, not its composition. If its a matter of titling what your position was within the team, then simply choose the one you were in longest, or the one that you feel best describes your roal within the team.

At the end of the day, a resume is your "sales proposal" about yourself to a prospective client. You want to portray the information that would give them the best reason to buy. 13 positions seems like you moved around a bunch, that youre not consistently in one position for long. But in the reality you worked on a number of projects for one company with varying responsibilities.