CV / Resume - Functional or Chronological?

Video Transcript:

Hi. Welcome to our fireside chat. My name is Shannon Houde and I am the founder and career coach for Walk of Life Consulting.

Today I would like to challenge you with deciding whether or not a function or skills based resume or CV is better for you in terms of marketing yourself versus a chronological or time based resume or CV. And I tend to start clients off with a functional or skills based resume and CV because it actually serves a lot of different purposes if you're making a career change or if you're trying to actually sell a skill set to the hiring manager. So this works well also to show what you can do on the job. So a hiring manager is looking to make sure you can do the job.

And a skills based CV allows you to look at the four key skill categories that are your areas of expertise and excellence. And then map not responsibilities to those four skill categories, but actually map achievements and results of what you've done in your past history. So it gives a really compelling storyline to who you are, what you're capable of, and what your track record has been regardless of where you actually did those achievements.

So for instance, if you had an NGO leadership role in your free time or you did a project as part of your masters, you would be able to weave that in to your functional or skills based resume, whereas it might get lost a bit in a chronological. And the only few words of caution around doing a functional resume would be that recruitment agencies don't usually like them. And LinkedIn requires a chronological. So what I would encourage you to do is if you think you want to do that chronological and you need it for LinkedIn to start with your functional, come up with your four key skill categories today. So get your pen out, write down those four key skill categories and map twelve achievements to those and then you can remap those back to when and where you did those achievements after you've got your storyline together around the skills.

So I hope that this exercise will be helpful for you to start thinking about how to map your personal brand and your marketing of yourself around what you're going to actually offer that hiring manager and be able to deliver. Good luck.