Get Your Resume Up to Date After an Employment Gap

If you’ve decided to start looking for new flexible job postings after taking some time off to care for your family, you’ll need to get your resume in order. You may be concerned about how to explain the gaps in your employment, but you shouldn’t be. There are many men and women out there reentering the workforce after spending years at home, and you likely won’t be the first person a potential employer has encountered who’s getting back into the game after months or even years of not working. That being said, you’ll still want to take a good look at your resume and think of ways you can update it. 

Look for ways to add more 
According to Loeber, he would sometimes interview someone who had a large gap in his or her employment history and wonder why he should take a chance on him or her, when he could hire someone who’s been consistently working. He said what would change his mind about these individuals would be if he saw that they had been taking some sort of classes over the years to keep their skills in their industry sharp and up to date. If you’ve taken any classes like this, whether they’ve been at an institution of higher learning or online, you should make sure to add that to your resume. 

You may think that any and all volunteer work you’ve done in the past few years should be on your resume, but Loeber said that may not necessarily be the case – some volunteer work is more important than others. 

“If you’re doing volunteer ‘grunt work’ [think: setting up the school cafeteria for end-of-year parties], that doesn’t have much value. It’s not transferable to a job. It’s nice, but I can’t use it,” Loeber told SheKnows. “The type of volunteer work that does have value to a hiring manager? When you’ve led something, created something or been an officer of something. Did your role involve decision-making, managing budgets, dealing with conflict, long-term planning or dealing with the school board or the board of directors?” 

He added that if you have any of this type of volunteer experience, you should be sure to highlight anything you achieved, such as how much money you raised for a fundraiser or if you influenced any change in your community. 

You also need to make sure that your resume is formatted properly. The Huffington Post explained that while Times New Roman font is still acceptable, that doesn’t mean that you can’t go with something a little more modern, such as Arial. Furthermore, you need to make sure that your resume has links to any applicable social media you’re on, such as your LinkedIn profile or your Twitter account, as long as the content you have in these is relevant to your position and appropriate for potential employers to see. 

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