Documenting Life Changes

In my former life, I viewed resumes. Hours and hours of reading resumes of job seekers. Job seekers who sent me lists of former jobs with the names of employers misspelled. Job seekers who saw fit to note on their resume that they were married with X-amount of children. Job seekers who felt that a prospective employer should know to which religious belief they subscribed or how they spent their weekends. Typos, grammatical errors, spelling errors...I often had to fight the temptation to mark up their offerings with a red pen and send them back with a "better luck next time" note attached. I even considered writing a book about how to design an effective resume, and then realized that the people sending me the awful resumes probably wouldn't read the book.

Since I've changed careers, I've put off rewriting my own resume. I just added my additional education information and student teaching jobs to my Human Resources resume and that was that. It was good enough to get me hired as a substitute. Yet, I don't wish to remain a substitute, and it's time to start applying for positions for the next school year. The time has come to do some surgery.

For some reason, paring down my resume is more painful than walking out on my former career. It's harder than passing the tests to get into the credential program. It's worse than the additional year of school required for my teaching credential. It's more difficult than facing a room full of exuberant students who have just realized today is Torment the Substitute Teacher Day.

Why?

A good resume is written documentation of the accomplishments you've achieved in your career. You are showing that yes, you can and yes, you have done these things. You've passed these tests and gained these professional designations. Someone else was impressed enough with what you did while working for a former employer to give you a chance at a new opportunity. A resume is your chance at no-holds bragging and it is the only time anyone will ever really care about your professional experience.

So, to reformat my own resume and make it appeal to an entirely different career field means deleting a lot of information that is not applicable to the new field. In my own case, I highly doubt that a school district will care about my experience processing payroll, recruiting, handling employee relations issues, etc., etc., etc.... They don't need the details about every job duty I've ever been responsible to complete. They only care about what is applicable in their world. And that's where I need to adjust my own focus. I'm not wiping out my own past. I'm simply making some changes.

I guess I'd better get to it, then, instead of sitting here blogging about it!