Before You Rewrite Your Resume, Focus On Your Narrative

Job seekers and career-transitioners often come to me in a panic, feeling they are unemployable. They believe they will never find a job that pays them what they want, let alone with a company that’s aligned with their values.

 They fear:

 Their experience is fragmented and all over the place.

 They’ve stayed at one company too long.

 They’re too old and their experience will not be valued.

 They’re too young, appearing green and naïve.

 They’ve spent too much time out of the work force.

 All of this may be true, in the version of the story they are telling. Before we get to any of their materials—elevator pitch, resume, LinkedIn and beyond—we rework their narratives.

 If you’d like to begin this process, I invite you to push your thinking with this free writing exercise:

Rewrite your narrative as if you’ve stepped into an alternate reality where every career move you made was intentional, and you learned something important from every role and every change.

 As you move away from the formality of your resume and the salesmanship of LinkedIn to view your story from a different perspective, you will find:

 Meaning
There were deep relationships built and lessons learned that could only have been found in what seemed to be failures at the time. There were risks taken that prompted you to grow. Moments where you discovered a true purpose behind your work AND moments where you found you needed to rediscover how you could best use your talents.

A Through Line
Even if it is not obvious at first, there is connective tissue that bonds each career move into a cohesive, contained package. Whether you find it in your values or in a certain strength of yours that was often leveraged or amplified in others, there is a way to pull a disjointed or fragmented seeming career into one that makes sense to you—and one that can be more easily explained to others.  

The Skeletons
Every career has its fair share of challenges. Toxic bosses who give you an eye twitch for many months. Microagressions in a corporate culture built on white supremacy. Being passed over for a promotion while on parental leave. These are critical offenses and issues that shaped what you are striving for in your next role to feel safe and valued. And yet now, you get to choose how much or how little you share about them in your narrative. I highly encourage you to work to heal these career-related traumas with a therapist and reflect on how you shape the story so that you both advocate for what you need, and also share the version that helps you connect to your confidence and your worth.

 Once you’ve completed the exercise, share it with a friend, former colleague or your coach. Notice how it feels to tell the story in this new, all-true and yet intentionally shifted perspective. Practice this retelling when you’re networking or discussing your career change with friends. Start with your close-in circle so that your narrative seeps into your muscle memory. This will create a more fluid process when writing all your other materials, and help you step into your interviews with the clarity of what you have to offer.