"Is Experience From 10-20 Years Ago Still Relevant on Your Resume?"
In today’s hyper-intense and crowded job market, employers are becoming more and more intolerant of lengthy resumes that take up too much of their valuable time. Decision-makers prefer “Executive Summary” documents for major business decisions - they do not want to spend 15 to 20 minutes reading a resume. In fact, many studies suggest that resumes are barely read at all, but are scanned for key words and concepts.
That being true, you, the job seeker, are faced with some important challenges in developing a summarized style of resume. The key question becomes:
Where should the focus be?
Clearly, the answer is that the most recent ten, probably five, years are critically important and almost all resumes cover that pretty well. However, if you are over 35, there is additional background, some of it possibly quite substantial, that still needs to be addressed.
One mistake many people make is to utilize the same format describing their more recent jobs (covering last five to ten years) to describe many if not all earlier positions as well. This over-comprehensive approach lengthens the document significantly and tends to lead to “reader fatigue.”
Additionally, by dwelling too much on older duties, one can date oneself, especially in technical areas. Frankly, success dealing with Y2K is not particularly relevant today and certainly claiming a past proficiency in DOS is not going to speed offers.
Our advice is to summarize any experience older than 10-15 years in a paragraph form. Think carefully and decide what in those past assignments is still relevant today or demonstrates skill sets still desirable. Then, cover it in a single paragraph no longer than 2-4 sentences.
This approach will keep your document to a readable length and still convey all essential information about your total career …and likely avoid quick de-selection by a decision-maker too busy to read a long resume.
Naturally, if you are unsure just how to do this well, use of a professional resume writer can quickly resolve this for you and speed you on your search.
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