Submitted by flexiblefine on
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What should I do with 20- or 25-year-old jobs on my resume where I have no accomplishments?
The new content to go with the Resume Workbook has prompted me to do another revision to my most recent resume. I found the room to get more old jobs on my page... but I don't have any accomplishments for them.
These are jobs like retail sales (where I was in a low-performing store, so we didn't get any sales awards) and telemarketing (yes, I called people to interrupt their dinner and sell vinyl siding). My last 20 years has been in IT positions.
I have nothing to justify any accomplishments for these positions, so how do I balance "every job should have an accomplishment" with truthfulness?
I would leave them off
Chances are the recruiter won't be that interested in the achievements from 20 years old positions or even 20 years old positions, especially if they were outside the field you're applying for.
Use the space to put more achievements on more recent positions. I did exactly that to my resume, I chopped off the first 5 years of my career and discuss them with the recruiter only if he explicitly asks about them.
That's what I was thinking
I had originally left off those jobs for the same reason -- they're old and therefore irrelevant. Putting them back in, though, rounded out my background in interesting ways.
The MT advice is to list all jobs on your resume, no matter how many that is or how far back they go. So I tried to add them in, and I got them on the page. And then I rediscovered the "each job should have at least one accomplishment" advice, and I went back at the revisions.
I will probably choose the middle path of listing the jobs without accomplishments, as you suggest.
flexiblefine
Houston, Texas, USA
DiSC: 1476
I actually have a somewhat
I actually have a somewhat similar issue, as I said I can fit 17 years of my 22 years career in IT on a single page. That includes several achievements for almost all positions, including 6 achievements for the two current positions (Senior Engineer and Team Lead, Acting Manager).
There is a 6 months contract, 14 years ago, for which I am unable to extract a real tangible/useful achievement for the resume. Every time I think of one, I discard it as it either sounds like puffery to me or is too esoteric.
And there's more!
A couple of those jobs were at local universities -- one selective and well-regarded, one much less so. I did not receive a degree from either of these schools.
Should I list anything for a degree I did not complete? I got about three-quarters of the way through a computer science degree at the better school before monetary and academic difficulties kept me from going farther. I took a handful of courses at the other school before I moved out into the real world permanently.
I did complete a bachelor's degree and MBA later, and those are listed on my resume.
flexiblefine
Houston, Texas, USA
DiSC: 1476