Productive Ways to Fill Resume Gaps

No matter if you’re in a career transition or between jobs, it’s vital you continue to build skills and successes you can show on your resume.  You will be viewed much more positively if you demonstrate recent achievements and continued growth than if you present a resume representing no new skill development or career growth over the last several months.  You will also have interesting things to talk about when asked what you have been doing recently.

Spending time productively sounds much more impressive than simply saying you’ve been looking for a job. Here are four excellent avenues for productivity during a job search:

Volunteer

Give back to the community and add to your resume at the same time.

• Be strategic about your choice of volunteer positions
• Seek volunteer work at your professional level
• Have goals including creating new success for the organization
• Document successes and add them to your resume
• Network with others in the organization and fellow volunteers

Intern

Transition into a new field or grow new skills.

• Seek a position where you will have ownership of an area, allowing you to grow expertise and create quantifiable results
• Be sure the company you are interning with has the bandwidth to help you learn and grow
• Establish clear goals and go over them with your manager
• Document your successes and add to your resume
• Network
• Be proactive and create success so you can turn internship into a job

Take classes

• Demonstrate you are a lifelong learner, eager to gain new skills
• Target a course that fills a skills gap
• If you don’t have a skills gap, expand your knowledge, or enter a new area
• Get a certification that can help you meet requirements of more job opportunities
• Add your class or certification program to your resume immediately with an estimated completion date
• Network with classmates and teachers

Mentor

Job seekers often feel they have so much to give. Mentoring allows you to demonstrate that.

• Offer to mentor someone who is new to your field or job type
• Set concrete goals for the mentoring relationship
• Document successes
• Include mentoring on your resume, along with successes
• Ask the person you are mentoring to write a recommendation for you on LinkedIn and act as a reference in your job search

Don’t allow your resume to get stale with no new achievements. Pick an avenue for learning, growing and generating new successes and keep your resume fresh.