By the time a person reaches the age of 50, they more than
likely have a lot of job experience. It doesn't matter if they have spent their
career with the same company or have varied employment history with many
businesses encompassing many fields.
While all of your experiences have helped to qualify you as
the candidate most companies should hire, avoid listing them all on the resume
that you are sending out, especially if they date back more than 5 years. The
place for the extensive work history is the master resume.
The master resume is where you document your work history,
skills, excellent performance reviews, awards and volunteer work. Once you
complete the master resume, you will easily be able to pull out the
accomplishments for the actual resume for a specific job that you will send
out.
A master resume sounds like an overwhelming task, but it
really isn't. Keep in mind that you won’t be sharing this with anyone. It will
only serve to help you remember all of your qualifications when you apply for a
position. Start out by jotting down a rough timeline of your life since high
school. You probably won’t be able to remember all of the dates, but you can go
back and fill them in later.
Once you've made an outline of your life story, go back and
start filling in the details. Add the projects that you handled promotions,
classes and training, technologies, processes, and responsibilities of each
job. Add the name of your supervisors. It’s probable that you won’t remember a
lot of details, but you can add them as you think of them.
Once you have completed your master resume, you’ll find that
writing targeted resumes will go a lot quicker. The more familiar you get with
specialized resumes, the easier it will be to polish the wording of your
accomplishments so that your application shines.
