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Re: How to mention distant-past experience on a resume?
Subject:Re: How to mention distant-past experience on a resume? From:"Stuart Burnfield" <slb -at- westnet -dot- com -dot- au> To:"Techwr-l" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>, bsherman77 -at- embarqmail -dot- com Date:Mon, 01 Dec 2014 09:32:02 +0800
Most employers rate relevant experience very highly, and they're smart
to do so. OTOH, as Bill says, they're reluctant to hire or pay for
someone with _too _much experience or gaps in the history.
I worked as a programmer (whoops, showing my age there--'software
developer') on IBM systems up till the early 1990s. The coding
experience has been helpful in many contracts, and the IBM experience
helped me get several years of work at two different sites. But these
days I wouldn't want to list every job back to the late 1980s just to
include that experience.
Instead, I'd mention the relevant-but-old experience in the cover
letter or intro paragraph ("... experienced technical writer and
former XXX") and list only the recent and relevant gigs in the body of
the rÃsumÃ. If they're curious about when you got the XXX experience
they can ask at the interview.
--- Stuart
Bill Sherman said:
> The experience thing is a tricky game. If you have something
important to this
> job 20 years ago but you have trimmed out irrelevant jobs from 15
years ago,
> they get suspicious of the holes. As soon as they pull your high
school records,
> they have your age. Hiding it on the resume doesn't do any good
really. It might
> just get you further up the process before they discriminate on age.
>
> And you risk leaving off a piece that might be just what they are
looking for.
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