If you're not quite sure whether your own career is one that should or should not use a chronological resume, then why not compare it to the following example. When Jim, a client of mine, first got out of school he went into sales and worked his way up to the position of district sales manager. After that he became dissatisfied with sales management for some reason or other, and so he secured a position with a research firm, which he has held for five years. Even though Jim did reasonably well with the research outfit-he was promoted to a department head-he still wants out! He has made up his mind that field sales is more his cup of tea, and now he wants to get back to it.
The example above is fairly straightforward. Over the years I've counseled job-seekers who have meandered back and forth between two, three and even four different careers every few years! People in situations like this are not that rare. If you are one of them, trying to sell yourself with a chronological resume has to be a mistake.
Why? Because the last job you held has nothing to do with what you want to do now. Still, according to the chronological resume rulebook, you're supposed to head up your resume with your present job. Obviously you run the risk of turning off your prospective boss when you "feature" your non related experience at the top of your resume while other candidates offer current experience that is directly in tune with the job you and they are competing for.
Functional Resume
Confronted by circumstances like this, many job-seekers have turned to a "functional" resume as a way out. A functional resume is one in which you describe your accumulated capabilities, rather than providing a timetable of your career as in the chronological resume. You can include any and every major capability you wish. Jim, the sales-manager-turned-researcher, for example, might use such capability categories as Direct selling, Territory management, Personnel management, Training, Audit tabulation, Project planning, Field surveys, etc. Usually, in such resumes, you discuss each of your key capabilities in a separate paragraph or two. The nice thing is that you can organize them any way you see fit. Since there are no dates attached to "capabilities," you can describe something you learned to do ten years ago at the head of page one, if you think that particular capability will be more sale able in terms of the job you are now going after. Similarly, you can describe a capability you obtained on the job you held during the last five years at the bottom of page one or on page two, or if you were so disposed, you could leave it off your resume entirely.
Another thing-in the functional resume, the actual "chronology" of your career can be placed anywhere you like. Most people using a functional resume list their jobs and the dates they held them on page two of their resume, where they are likely to do the least harm. The idea obviously is to turn on your prospective boss, when he first picks up your resume, by featuring the capabilities he's probably looking for, and to take your lumps on page two when he discovers in reviewing your brief chronology that the capabilities you feature probably were not learned in your most recent positions. What does a functional resume actually look like? Let's consider our salesman-turned-researcher once again. After stating his job objective-which can be written as for a chronological resume-the balance of Jim's resume might look something like this:
There's only one problem with the functional resume described above, any prospective employer worth his salt knows from the moment he sets eyes on it that you are trying to hide something in your career. The "functional" resume format is, in a word, a warning signal to many prospective bosses that there's a problem in the candidate's background. As such, there's a very good chance that if you use a functional resume, you'll defeat the very objective that caused you to develop it in the first place. Because the functional resume looks so unlike a chronological resume, and because today it is infrequently used, it usually stands out like a sore thumb.
Hybrid Resume
At this point you're probably wondering what sort of resume you can write if your career hasn't been on a consistent path. Is there any document that will help rather than hurt your current search? Unfortunately I know of no foolproof answer. Anything other than the standard chronological format will, in some instances, works against you. What I recommend to people in this situation is a resume that combines the look of a chronological resume with the flexibility of the functional format. This hybrid resume of mine follows the standard chronological format except for one thing: you leave DATES off the left hand column and substitute CAREERS in their place.
Let's consider what Jim, our salesman-turned-researcher, might do with his resume, as an example. After he finished writing a standard chronological resume including company names, titles, scope and worth point paragraphs, he would simply grab a pair of scissors and piece together his resume with his sales career up front. In abbreviated form, it might look something like this:
After describing his experience in his sales and research careers, the rest of Jim's resume should follow the standard chronological format with one exception. Somewhere on page two, in addition to Education, Personal, Military, Honors, etc., Jim will need to include a Chronology similar to the one shown in the functional resume described earlier. If he's smart, Jim will make it as inconspicuous as possible, using single spacing for the section, and leaving off capitalized words and underlines. If possible, Jim should try to "bury" this section in between the Military and Education sections of his resume, hoping that his awkward career path goes unnoticed until after his prospective boss has become turned on by his background in selling.
Quite frankly, the hybrid resume described above won't work all the time. Some prospective boss somewhere is going to get his hackles up when he realizes that the company and position you describe at the top of your resume isn't your most recent one. But if you'll take the word of the hundreds of job-seekers who have tried both, the hybrid resume works in many cases a lot better than the functional resume and can help you make the best of a difficult-to-sell career path. Most job-seekers who have used the hybrid resume report that prospective bosses are totally unaware of the chronological paste-up job until the job-seeker gets to the interview and then points out that the order of jobs in the resume itself doesn't quite agree with the chronology shown on page two. It's safe to say that the hybrid format works to get you in the door. Beyond that no claims are made. Certainly your prospective employer will be disappointed-or in some cases a little angry-to learn that the job you highlight at the top isn't your most recent one. But if you handle yourself well in your interview, and are frank and forthright about your career situation, you at least have a fighting chance against other candidates whose career paths are more appropriate to the opening.
