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The Skills Resume
The skills resume is sometimes called a functional resume. In this format, your experience is organized under key skills. A well-done skills resume emphasizes skills that your job objective requires. These should also be the same skills that you are good at and want to use. Look at the resume that follows and notice how it emphasizes skills rather than employment dates and job titles.
See an example of a simple skills resume.

Advantages and Disadvantages of a Skills Resume
As with a chronological resume, the skills resume has both good and not-so-good points:

Advantages: A skills resume allows you to present accomplishments from all your life experiences. It is a good format when you need to "hide" problems that a chronological resume might show. In the above sample, Andrea's resume does a good job of presenting what she can do, without making it obvious that her work experience is limited to part-time and summer jobs. Nor does it say that she is a recent graduate.
A well-written skills resume presents your strengths and avoids showing your weaknesses. For example, it can hide limited paid work experience, gaps in your job history, and little or no paid work experience in the field you want to get into now.

Disadvantages: Because a skills resume can hide details that can be used to screen people out, some employers don't like them. Skills resumes can also be much harder to write than a chronological resume.

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For individual use only. Pages are excerpts from The Very Quick Job Search, Third Edition, ISBN: 1-59357-007-4. For permissions requests, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at www.copyright.com or (978) 750-8400.

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