When it comes to resume writing, there is a lot of conflicting advice. One area that people can often improve is how they set out their work history. While resume writing does not require you to be a Shakespeare, you do need to follow some simple guidelines if you want to be successful. When including your experience whether it be full time, part time, and internship or other experience, your method of resume writing should be logical. List all of your paid and unpaid work experience that is relevant to the position. You may also include experience that relates indirectly to the job (i.e. experience which helped you to develop leadership, public speaking, organization skills etc).

In your resume writing, you should describe your responsibilities on the job, being specific and using active verbs. You should always put these verbs in the past tense even though you may currently be performing these duties. Think of yourself as an employer who is hiring and 15 qualified applicants come for the position. Each applicant has the same basic educational and work history background. So how do you choose someone? The quality of their resume writing is a start. This can show your ability to communicate ideas in written format. These resume writing skills will be imperative if report writing or other similar skills are needed for the job. Your resume writing, whether accomplished or not as experienced need to show that you contributed more than expected in your past positions. Accomplishments are one thing that can set you apart from others, but your accomplishments must be quantified. Be specific about dates, time frames and outcomes. Regardless of the fact that you may not be the most qualified person for the job, sometimes the quality of your resume writing can determine whether or not you will get an interview.

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.”