Should I omit the graduation date on my resume?
According to a resume “expert” at one career website: “If your degree is over 10 years old, it is time to take out the dates. Junior reviewers will toss your resume and make you a victim of age discrimination.”
Intentionally omitting dates is a colossal mistake, for two reasons: when you withhold information, you invite others to infer your reason for doing so; and, obscuring your years of experience will only cause you to be passed over for the most desirable positions.
In the case of this resume expert, the reason for omitting dates is: “junior reviewers will toss your resume and make you a victim of age discrimination”. Why would junior reviewers toss the resume?
Presumably, this expert believes that “junior” (or younger) resume reviewers discriminate against older job candidates, but reviewers who are not “junior” do not. In other words, this expert has learned: junior reviewers make mistakes in judging resumes.
Now if this expert has learned that the judgment of junior resume reviewers is inferior to that of older reviewers, doesn’t it stand to reason that there are many, many hiring managers who appreciate the superior judgment of older workers?
I suspect this resume expert has little or no experience actually screening resumes and hiring people. I say so because, contrary to popular belief, hiring managers do NOT discriminate on the basis of age (or sex, color, race, etc.) as doing so would arbitrarily reduce the number of qualified candidates. It is hard enough to find well-qualified candidates to fill important positions, why make the task even harder by arbitrarily eliminating many of them?
Job seekers often tell me they get more interviews after they remove degree dates and some early jobs from their resume. When I ask if the increased number of interviews resulted in more job offers, the answer is always “no”.
It turns out that employers are actually quite rational. For a job with limited responsibility and requiring only moderate experience, the ideal candidate is one with minimal work experience and willing to work under less than ideal conditions, for low pay, in order to acquire more work experience.
For management positions with significant responsibilities, employers seek candidates with substantial breadth and depth of management and industry experience. For these positions, employers not only prefer older workers, younger workers won’t even be considered.
This is what you accomplish when you omit information in order to obscure your age: 1) more interviews for low-paying positions with negligible responsibility, and 2) fewer interviews for higher-paying positions requiring judgment, experience, industry knowledge, management skill, and wisdom.
Should an older worker list early positions on a resume?
List all of your previous positions. As an older employee, extensive experience is your greatest asset, and it is an area in which you have an indisputable competitive advantage over younger workers.
Many job seekers drop from their resume positions held early in their career. When I ask candidates about jobs they’ve left off the resume, I often find gems that add to the candidate’s qualifications.
Sometimes a position the candidate considered irrelevant may be quite relevant, but for reasons not anticipated by the candidate.
For example, a history of several short-tenure jobs will be viewed negatively by prospective employers. Including early work experience showing long tenure with one or more employers will help counteract the impression of job instability. While the candidate may view the early experience as irrelevant to the type of work they now do, an employer may view it as quite relevant to judging the prospective employee’s overall fitness.
Another example: a senior-level management position is being filled. One applicant omitted his first job in an unrelated field (banking) from his resume. The position is currently held by a highly-regarded individual who, as it turns out, began his career working for a bank–experience which he views as having bolstered his budget management skills. Had the applicant included the banking experience, he likely would be viewed more favorably owing to the similarity with the work history of the current manager.
When listing early career positions, it is not necessary to include the same level of detail as more recent positions. Dates of employment, position held and employer’s name should be adequate. Including outstanding achievements or accomplishments is always a good idea.
How do I find a management job after being self-employed for 20 years?
Many believe it is difficult to find a job after a long period of self-employment. Yet, I have reviewed thousands of resumes which often show that individuals find desirable work after a long period of self-employment. Therefore, I have concluded that it’s probably no more difficult for the self-employed to find career opportunities than those who have not been self-employed.
That’s not to say there are no challenges, but 20 years of self-employment confers significant and unique advantages on a job seeker.
First of all, most job seekers today have resumes characterized by job instability: too many jobs that lasted for two years or less, and too few jobs that last for more than four years. Aside from not meeting the position requirements, job instability is the chief reason candidates are rejected, and the more senior the position to be filled, the more heavily it weighs. So twenty years in any job–self-employed or otherwise–is a strong asset.
Next up for consideration is the match between work experience and the particular position you may be seeking. Every employer has certain qualifications in mind when filling a position and these may be categorized as: 1. industry experience, 2. work experience, and 3. responsibility experience.
Industry experience refers to the knowledge and familiarity with normal expectations one acquires from working in a particular field or industry. I still recall much of what I learned in the first few years I spent in the printing business, but I would be quite lost in a modern graphic arts facility due to technological advance.
Work experience is “on-the-job-training” from which we learn to perform a range of tasks and projects appropriate to a specific job and industry. Up to a point, greater work experience increases efficiency and decreases “spoilage” or bad outcomes.
Responsibility experience refers primarily to experience in management, including the management of staff, budgets, facilities, resources and, in some cases, profit and loss. When filling management positions, employers typically consider both the scope and extent of experience in each of these categories.
Do you see where this is leading? You must inventory your work experience in each of these three areas; list everything, not just the big stuff. For example, experience using Quickbooks accounting software is a marketable skill and should be on your list. Order the list based on the amount and recentness of your experience, since the passage of time depreciates its value, particularly in the case of industry experience.
This list will serve as your guide for three purposes. First, you can use it to brainstorm the types of employers and positions to which your experience and skills may be applicable. Second, it is a checklist of essential assets that should be mentioned on your resume. Third, it will aid in marketing your experience to potential employers.
The first and third points require further explanation. The applicability of your experience to certain fields or types of work will be immediately obvious, but with some reflection and creative insight, you may recognize that your experience is quite applicable to other fields as well. The logic supporting the applicability of your experience in a seemingly unrelated field must be thought through and internalized so you can easily demonstrate the connection to a potential employer.
Now you should see that several key factors (job stability; industry, work and responsibility experience; and applicability of experience and skills to the open position) constitute the basis for hiring decisions. These factors have little or nothing to do with whether one is currently self-employed.
If you understand the depth and breadth of your experience, and can quantify and communicate an accurate description to a prospective employer, you are ready to go job hunting. If you pursue jobs that fit your experience, you will actually have a competitive advantage in the job market.
What is the risk in self-employment, changing careers, going back to college, a dead end job or a lateral move?
There is not much to fear from self-employment that doesn’t work out. Your career will suffer nothing more than a delay and employers will not hold your entrepreneurial effort against you when considering you for a job. Of course, going back to your former career becomes more difficult with the passage of time as your career skills and knowledge of developments in the field become rusty.
Going back to college is not a risk if you acquire technical knowledge usable on the job–electrical engineering, for example–or general business knowledge, as with an MBA. Otherwise the value gained may be less than what is lost by taking the time off from work.
The one exception is when one becomes qualified in an unrelated, but intersecting area. An engineer, for example, who earns a degree in law can move to their employer’s legal department and likely secure a substantial increase in compensation.
Changing careers is clearly a risk vs. reward proposition with outcomes ranging from completely unknown to relatively foreseeable. If the field in which you work is in decline (say, film-based photography), the lowest risk option is to leverage your existing skills to enter another field that has long-term growth potential, even if you must take a short term cut in pay.
When changing careers, the least risky move is one that leverages your most valuable knowledge and skills. An accountant who wishes to move into the nonprofit field would be well-advised to seek employment as an accountant or financial officer with a nonprofit, but seeking a position, say, in fundraising, public relations, or management would carry a much higher risk for failure and loss of income. Career risk is mitigated by having a fallback option whereby you seek re-employment in the field where your skills and experience are most highly valued.
Staying in a dead end job is like keeping your money in a safe deposit box–there is little risk of theft, but relative to funds deposited in an interest-bearing account, your asset looses value every day. Ideally, one avoids becoming employed in a dead end job in the first place, but for younger workers, a dead end job may be the best job available at the time a choice must be made. Most people solve the dead end job problem by moving on after several years when advancement in income and responsibility become less likely.
Making a lateral move is sometimes a better option than staying put. A job change which brings no immediate gain in pay or responsibilities is worthwhile if the new employer has significantly better growth potential and opportunity for advancement than the former employer.
