What is a “Master” Resume and why do you need one?

There is lots of advice about “tailoring” your resume. This means ensuring that your resume aligns with the stated responsibilities, requirements and preferred qualifications for the specific position. In order to do this, you need to have your entire employment history readily available. 

One of the easiest ways to do this is to keep a “master” resume. It literally has EVERYTHING you have done in your career to pull from. “Everything” includes your employers, dates, titles, what your original job description looked like, and all the work you performed for each employer. 

How do you ensure you have this information? 

• Keep a copy of the original job you were hired into

• Any annual/professional reviews you have will be instrumental in documenting your progress

• Record all the training/certifications you achieve

• Every time you complete a project, make sure you add it to your master document. 

One of the easiest ways to structure your projects to be resume-ready is to use the STAR method (yes, the same one recommended for interviews.) Solved problem A by doing B using C to achieve D. 

Situation: what is the problem you are trying to solve? Be detailed; WHY is it a problem, how is it impacting the ability to get business done? 

Task: how are you going to approach this problem? 

Action:  what are tools/methodologies/resources you are going to use to solve it? 

Results: what are the end results? If at all possible you should use some sort of metrics like $ (saved or revenue), % (time/money saved or earned), # people, resources, increments of time. 

Once you have your “master” resume, you should be able to create targeted documents for specific jobs. You may have more than one skill set and need two distinct resumes; or, you may just need to pull a specific bullet point forward for a job like a software package you haven’t used in a while, but can pick up with only a little bit of time to reorient yourself. Remember that you should DELETE items for targeted resumes. Everything on your tailored/targeted resume should speak exactly to the job you are pursuing. Remember that if you had training in 2012 for a software package you have been using every day since then, you don’t need to mention the training. 

Once you have your master resume built, tailoring should only take you a few minutes; you should not need to completely rewrite your resume for every position you pursue.