Yard sale: old resume experience 50 percent off!
Yard sale: old resume experience 50 percent off!
Moving to a new home is one of those incredibly stressful endeavors that inevitably makes you say to yourself, "I'm not going to do this again for a long, long time."That's the current pledge to myself as I settle into my new pad and continue to clear out my old one — and as I reconsider what my resume should consist of from now on.Mostly it's the aggregate of all the little things that need to be taken care of before moving that makes me spiral toward a nervous breakdown: forwarding mail; notifying credit card companies, insurance providers, Netflix, magazines, friends and family of the new address; canceling and transferring utilities; hassling about refunds and broken leases; cleaning; grappling with a new property management company about maintenance issues; renting a moving truck and mapping out the most efficient course of travel so I don't go over the allowed mileage and pay a ridiculous additional fee.And then, of course, the actual physical move.Despite the madness of moving, the pledge to oneself to not move again for a long time is usually short-lived. After all, life changes: you get a new job; you make more money and want a bigger place; you make less money and need a smaller place; you want to live in a better neighborhood, or closer to the city, or farther from the city; you get married; you start a family. The list goes on, and all the possibilities on that list can lead to rethinking the adequacy of your current digs — whether your needs match your surroundings.But most of us can point to one thing that really drives us nuts when we move. For me, it's attempting to get rid of stuff I don't need. Or rather, getting rid of stuff I don't need and shouldn't need in the future.How does one determine whether one might need something in the future? This is a question best answered by a pack rat, although I'm not sure you could technically classify me as one in the traditional sense. Indeed, I often take advantage of my inalienable right to throw useless junk away when I know I won't ever need it.But that healthy purging is kind of pointless because I often choose to purchase or accept things that the reasonable man somewhere inside me knows I don't need and will never use — things such as an old, rusted food scale I bought at a yard sale last year. I think I used it to weigh something once, but I'm not sure what it was I weighed or why exactly I needed to know its weight.Then there's the old burgundy movie theater chair that a friend converted into a living-room seat by nailing a couple of painted 2-by-4s to the bottom so it could stand on its own. I bought it from him for $30 and put it in my small one-bedroom apartment. A movie theater chair. I sat in it about a dozen times for a total of approximately 20 minutes.What was I thinking when I bought it? I'll tell you what I was thinking: "This is pretty cool. I think I'll buy it, keep it in my tiny apartment and then, a decade from now, when I own a home with enough room to have my own personal movie theater in the basement, I will have the most awesome vintage centerpiece ever."That pretty much sums up the disturbed mental state of a chronic collector of completely impractical items. So I tried again to purge some old junk I've collected, just as I have before each of the other five times I've moved in Greensboro over the past eight years. Despite my dreams of having a hiply accessorized personal home theater and the ability to weigh fresh fruit whenever I want, both the movie theater chair and the rusty scale both became victims of my mass clean-out.During one purging session, I came across some old resumes of mine, and without ever even looking at them, I realized something: my pack-rat problem applies to my most important job-search document, too. No matter how useless, no matter how superfluous it was to have it there, my two-week stint as a driver helper for UPS during the holidays my freshman year in college stayed on my resume for years ... and years. Honestly, I didn't even consider removing anything from my resume until relatively recently. When I first graduated from college, it was a matter of habit to put pretty much anything I did on my resume just so it would fill up a whole page. I rightly listed my contributions to my school newspaper, part-time jobs, internships — anything that might make it look like I was really busy in school. But by the time I had actually gained enough professional, real-world experience to trump the old ones, I had become so used to seeing them on my resume that I kept them there.Also, two lessons I had been taught somewhere along the line had been burned into my resume-writing style so much that they eventually became laws for me: 1) The 10-year rule: keep everything you have done in the past 10 years on your resume; and 2) Your resume must be one page long. If it is longer than one page, it must take up at least half of the second page. Turns out I had been brainwashed, or more likely, I refused to see it any other way. In fact, there are different schools of thought about what pertinent experiences to keep on your resume all the time and what junk to get rid of, or at least only briefly mention.This isn't to imply that the "junk" has no relevance. The junk, in fact, may be an important prologue to what you're doing now and how well you do it. But if it doesn't tell employers what you can do for them now, it's not worth the paper it's printed on. So it's great that I wrote for my college newspaper and that I endured a small tear in my meniscus and tendonitis of the knee jumping out of delivery trucks during my temp job with UPS, but what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Since then, I've written and edited feature news stories, designed newspaper pages, created marketing copy for a credit union trade association and managed a restaurant — all more significant, and recent, experiences that future employers will be drawn to, instead of left wondering why I feel the need to include the relatively unimportant contributions of a 19-year-old just trying to appear experienced.Then again, I don't think leaving in those experiences — which I have removed — would necessarily hurt my chances of landing a future job. But I doubt they'd help them either.As many career counselors will tell you, there's no one right way to write a resume, but there are plenty of wrong ways. Still, to keep or to purge certain past experiences is the question only a job seeker can answer for him or herself, in my opinion. If you decide on the former, just remember to ask yourself why you are keeping it. Does doing so make you a more or less attractive candidate for the job? Does it make your resume a stronger document or a cumbersome life story?And if you decide on the latter, just do what a pack rat like me would do: Cut and paste it into a new document to keep just in case.I know — old habits die hard.Contact Patrick Collins at 412-5934 or by e-mail at patrick.collins@news-record.com.
