Celebrate Your Freedom … to have more than one version of your resume.

When you are planning a trip, you decide to pack only the items that are relevant to your destination, even though you own many useful travel items. Heading to the beach in the summer? You’ll take your flip-flops, a swimsuit, and sunscreen. Heading to the ski resort in January? You’ll take your boots, skis, and sunscreen.

The same discretion about what to bring along applies to what you include on your resume.

You may always pack sunscreen regardless of your destination, but you won’t want to include your boots for your trip to the beach.

In your career journey, there may come a time when a single resume can’t do the trick for all of the career opportunities for which you have interest.

Creating a resume may mean writing a second or third version allowing you to leave some items behind though they are still available when you need them for a job listing that requires them. You will always own all of your experiences; they just don’t belong on every trip.

After reviewing the job description/posting, align your resume using the keywords from the job description to make your resume more focused for that particular job. Create versions of your resume with one job description in mind.

Don’t hesitate to exclude things that are irrelevant to the job that you are pursuing.

Keep a “Master Resume” containing all of your experience. In your Master Resume you can add as much as you like. This will be your go to document, your experience depot. You can then build focused, job title specific resumes as separate documents from your Master Resume.

While many of us become a jack-of-all trades in real life, on paper that will only come across as the notorious “master of none.”

With so many companies relying upon applicant tracking systems, it is a good strategy to have two or three versions of your resume at the ready: each focused on a specific job title.

When software is seeking keywords, your resume needs to be fine-tuned.

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