How To Handle Employment Gaps on a Resume

If you have a large gap in your resume, it may be best to change the order of your resume so that the gap is not so apparent. Creating a functional resume, rather than a chronological resume, will highlight your skills garnered from each job experience rather than highlighting the time frames of each job you’ve held. To do this, design a resume that creates skill clusters rather than listing individual jobs. Each job may appear several times in different skill clusters. This will show your versatility as well as your specific skills that relate to the job you are seeking.

Keep the most impressive skills at the top and tailor the resume to the different jobs for which you apply. The most prominent ones should be the skills that directly relate to the job for which you are applying. Follow those with smaller, more generalized skills that help to complement the main skills you highlighted. Your communications or customer assistance skills may be ones that will complement more specific skills like programming or leadership. Make sure to use specific details with all of your skill sets. How many people did you lead? How much money did you raise?

A very large gap in your resume may be addressed in your cover letter. A functional resume can make the gap less apparent, but if the gap is significant, it should generally be addressed in some fashion. When explaining the gap, never go into a long story that will make the gap even more prominent. Use a sentence or two to explain the gap simply and then move on to how you can benefit the company.

If you spent any of your gap time staying current in your industry, mention this in your cover letter and in your skills sections. If you have not networked with other people in the industry to stay current, then read trade magazines or make some other attempt to stay current; this will go a long way toward neutralizing the time spent out of the industry. It shows that you have kept the skills needed to perform the job and will not need any extra training to get up-to-speed.

If your resume gap happened a long time ago, the prospective employer may not be interested in it at all. If it was within the last few years, it should either be addressed or disguised with a different resume format. Few employers will give a second thought to a gap that occurred 15 years ago. Attempting to explain this gap will only serve to call attention to it. The purpose of your resume is to call attention to the many skills you have and the experience that makes you perfect for the job at hand.