It’s all in the Wording – Closing Your Employment Gap
Overcoming a gap in employment can be overwhelming. Whether you left the job market by choice or otherwise – my experience shows that unemployed clients are anything but idle.
The trick to minimizing a career gap is to position any unemployed experiences optimally with verbiage aligned with the professional world:
Volunteer Work
Fundraising, coaching, leading, organizing –these are the hallmarks of many volunteer roles.
If you raised $2,000 for your child’s school – highlight how you created a plan to make it happen, calculate if you raised more than the year prior and note it.
Made a labor-intensive process easier by putting things online or organizing items on a spreadsheet? Guess what? You’ve created efficiencies. Quantify the time saved and you’ve got an achievement!
Coached a team or led a scout troop? You’ve created an age-appropriate curriculum aligned with enterprise or organizational standards.
School Work
When someone leaves the workforce to pursue an advanced degree, it is often to change careers. Therefore, I recommend clients list their new education status at the top of the resume below their career title and branding paragraph.
Be sure to list coursework as the course titles often align with job posting keywords. If your curriculum did not include an internship highlight instead special assignments, group projects and presentations for which you received top grades or gained industry- or position-relevant insight.
Networking Work
When job hunting has been your main focus during the gap, it is critical to have something to show for it other than a pile of online job applications.
By participating in LinkedIn groups, initiating conversations and authoring or sharing thought-provoking posts, you can position yourself as an industry contributor and speak to the number of people that have read, liked or commented on your posts.
Expert Acts of Kindness
I can’t tell you how many times I have uncovered during a resume consult that a client has been helping a friend out by using their skills and asking nothing in return.
Dress these acts of kindness up and they can read like a job experience. If you helped a small retail business organize their books, note you streamlined bookkeeping for a retail enterprise. Using myself as an example, when my twins were babies I helped friends who were volunteering by writing or editing their press releases, brochures, etc. It wasn’t resume work per se but since it fell into the writing category it helped close my gap for a while!
All experience counts – paid or unpaid. Position it properly, and you will likely discover your large career gap doesn’t seem nearly as daunting.