To Resume a Résumé

I sit at my computer, staring helplessly at the screen.  I've been working hard at my job, but now it's time to move on, and the first step is updating my resume.  I know this, but right now it feels like my brain is frozen.  I'm pretty good at explaining things, so why can't I do this simple task?  Why does every sentence I write seem ungrammatical, incomprehensible, and lifeless?

Most of us have probably gone through that feeling.  Sometimes many times.  And for those of us who spend years working hard at one company it can be particularly frustrating.  We've done so much, and now need to somehow [A] remember everything we've done, [B] figure out what's important, and [C] reduce it from a beautiful, simmering, rich soup of experience, down to a flavor packet that can be easily digested.  The ramen-ization of your information.

So here are a few tactics that might help you get unstuck.  Some of these may be in direct conflict with each other, so feel free to try out any and abandon them if they don't resonate with you.

(Note: this really is a blog post about how to start writing your resume.  It won't tell you what to include and what to leave out, give advice like "use action verbs!" or other nuts-and-bolts stuff.  There's enough of that out there.  This is mostly about how to stop staring at a blank screen and uncork the knowledge floating around in your head.)

1. "Just Start Writing"
My mother has spent many years teaching writing, and sometimes teaching teachers how to teach writing.  (Isn't that a mouthful?)  One of her pieces of advice is to just sit down and start to write anything that occurs to you.  Don't worry about editing yet – for your first step, just get anything and everything down on paper.  (Editing is important too – but at first it can just trip you up.)

For me, the first sentence is often something like, "I don't want to be doing this crap!!!"  I may even write a few more sentences in this vein ("Why should I?  I don't wanna I don't wanna I don't wanna!")  Strangely, this sometimes gets it out of my system and lets me go ahead.

2. "Write it like you're explaining it to some random person"

Resumes are very simple, and use few words.  It can be really difficult to write in that style, particularly when you're also trying to remember what you did, and figure out if it's useful.

So don't start with resume writing.  Start by pretending you're writing a letter to someone.  Explain, using as many words as you need, what you've been working on during your time at this company.  Go off on tangents.  Go off and get a drink of coffee / slice of cheesecake / tub of ice cream (or is that just me?) and come back later to look for what you missed, or what might be hard to understand.

Then, when you've got a big ol' mass of writing, start to reduce it.  Start to think about what work will seem important to a reader, and what isn't.  Start to remove excess language, and tighten up sentences.

But the main point is: start with lots of text, and then make it smaller.

2b. "Write it like you're explaining to someone who knows your business"

Sometimes the "random person" is a bit too random.  I'm a computer programmer, and some of the things I need to write about will take hours if I'm explaining them to someone non-technical.  And that probably isn't worth it for a technical resume.  So I've written RESTful web services that communicate (of course) using HTTP and AJAX.  That won't make sense to a lot of human beings, but for the small subset that will read my resume, it will.

So sometimes it makes sense to write your first draft like you're writing to a friend who studied the same things in college, or someone you used to work with a few jobs ago, who's curious about what you've been up to.  You can skip some of the "Intro to My Field" stuff, but you still need to explain what you worked on, and why it's important.

3. "Write lists"

A completely different approach is to avoid prose, and just start writing lists.  I actually find that a pen or pencil and a blank, unlined piece of paper is more useful to me when I'm in this mode.  I just start writing lists in different places.  Some lists might be jargon.  Others might be projects I worked on.  Others might be names of programs I started or contributed to.

This is basically just brainstorming.  Getting lots of ideas out as quickly as possible.  Remembering.  Free-associating.

Is it messy?  Only if you do it right.  :-)  But at the end, hopefully you'll have some ideas of starting points, and can start to flesh them out.