I was born and raised in a small town in southeast Arkansas with a population of about 700. My parents were share-croppers. It was a hard life. We had no mechanical equipment. All of the power to needed to get the crops to market was provided by two old mules and us. My parents’ mantra to me and my other ten brothers and sisters was: “Get a good education so you can get a good job and make a good living.”

Well I earned a BA degree and joined the Air Force. After I was discharged, I found it difficult to find “good paying” work, however. The jobs I was able to land paid enough to put a roof over my head and allowed me to have a little “fun” but little else. Planning and saving for retirement were not priorities for me at that time.

When I finally began to focus a little on retirement in the late 1970′s, I was fortunate enough to begin carving out a career in the Public Sector as a school district administrator. I secured the services of a financial planner and set up a tax-deferred annuity. I was able to increase my income to six figures and was sailing along toward retirement. And then Life happened!

At age 62, I found myself suddenly thrown out of the district on my ear because the district massively over- spent its budget and had to eliminate nearly four hundred jobs, including mine, to just begin the long process of recovery. What would you do in that or a similar situation? I opted to retire rather than trek all over the country seeking another comparable six figure position. The shocker for me was the realization that even with my tax-deferred annuity that I had poured handsomely into, my total retirement income slid downward by nearly 20%! Obviously, I had not saved enough. I felt terribly. I felt like I had failed.

I later discovered that calculations of retirement income adequacy usually target 75%-8o% of pre-retirement income which is considered by many financial planners as adequate since the income needs of retirees are supposed to be lower than those of workers. The reasoning is households no longer need to save for retirement, taxes are supposedly lower, work- related expenses disappear, and the family size of retirees is generally smaller. Retirees are also expected to consume less (whatever that means). I was at 80% of my pre-retirement income, but that didn’t make me feel any better. All I could think about was I had worked nearly all of my adult life and now that I was retiring, I would have to live on less.

Remember, however, you do not have to live on less in retirement. No matter where you are right now financially, you can build and enjoy a retirement lifestyle that you desire. Peace.

When Jason, a 37-year old manager, emailed his old resume to our office for professional rewriting, it was obvious at first glance that we would have our work cut out for us. Although Jason had graduated from college 16 years ago in 1991, there were a total of nine jobs on his old resume. He also mentioned to us in his email that he had “a couple more jobs” for us to add.

According to a U.S. Department of Labor study, changing jobs is common in today’s workplace, “The average American worker between ages 37 and 45 in 2002 had changed jobs 10.2 times. For workers who started a new job between ages 33 and 38, a total of 39 percent reported that they changed jobs again within a year and 70 percent changed jobs again within five years.” These changes can be due to employee choices or layoffs. In fact, the data show that today’s college graduates will change jobs 10-14 times during their careers and the average job will last just three to five years.

After strategically retooling Jason’s resume, we were able to use effective techniques to create a document that would prove far more effective in attracting the types of job offers that he really wanted. At the same time, as a member of a professional resume writing association with strong ethical standards for professionalism, I wanted to ensure that Jason’s resume was well within the bounds of accuracy and honesty.

Here are the 4 techniques used by professional resume writers to help clients avoid the “Jobhopper” label:

1.Consider dropping jobs that are of very short duration, seasonal, or part-time. A resume is designed to serve as a career summary or overview, not necessarily an exact recitation of each and every job a candidate has ever had. Years ago, I coined the expression, “A resume is not a dossier.” However, if removing certain jobs creates a “gap” in the timeline, it should be carefully reviewed before dropping. (Note: Since many modern resumes use only years, and not months, to document the duration of each position, dropping some shorter positions will generally not necessarily create a noticeable gap.)

2.Consider “aggregating” or combining some jobs. In Jason’s case, he had several nearly identical positions on his old resume, one after the other, as assistant manager at mall-based retail stores. Even though they were for different employers and there were some slight differences in the duties, we were able to create a single assistant manager job description covering a 5-year period that listed all three employers and provided a great overview of his combined duties, responsibilities, and accomplishments. Even though anyone can see that they were three separate jobs, the psychological effect of combining those three items into one was undeniable. Remember, employers often make split-second decisions on the desirability of a candidate based upon 10-second glances at piles of resumes.

3.Consider repositioning, or “hiding” certain jobs. Two of Jason’s jobs occurred during his college years. By taking those two positions, which were actually quite helpful in terms of the experience he gained and his excellent performance, and inserting them directly within the “Education” section of his resume, his “Employment Experience” section looked much less crowded.

4.Consider creating a “Previous Positions” section. Jason’s most relevant and professional jobs were his four most recent positions. We fully documented each of those positions, complete with ample job descriptions and hard-hitting quantitative data on his accomplishments. We then created a “Previous Positions” section, simply listing his other jobs with only job title, company name, city, state, and dates. Had we dropped those earlier jobs entirely, as job seekers sometimes do, we would have created a glaring job gap that may have generated more problems than it solved. By highlighting and focusing on the more recent positions, the overall psychological effect was to confer more job stability. 14 years of experience as a resume writer has shown me that if one resume shows, for example, 8 positions, all fairly equal in length, and another resume shows four positions equal in length with a separate section listing the four additional jobs, the second approach will help the candidate appear to as less of a job-hopper.

In today’s dynamic and volatile economy, the goal of the professional resume writer is to balance accurate documentation with effective presentation. By using these four powerful techniques to assist job seekers with “too many” jobs in their employment history, we can help our clients to land interviews and get the job offers that they otherwise would have lost due to “job hopping.”