Quintessential Careers:
Should You Consider a Functional Format for Your Resume?
by Katharine Hansen, Ph.D.
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Today's resumes generally fall into one of two broad categories. They are either chronological (actually reverse chronological, listing all your experience from most to least recent) and functional, which lists experience in skills clusters. If you're planning to create your resume for the first time or update your old resume, you might wonder whether a functional format is right for you.
Among jobseekers who should consider a functional format:
- Those with very diverse experiences that don't add up to a clear-cut career path.
- College students with minimal experience and/or experience unrelated to their chosen career field.
- Career-changers who wish to enter a field very different from what all their previous experience points to.
- Those with gaps in their work history, such as homemakers who took time to raise and family and now wish to return to the workplace. For them, a chronological format can draw undue attention to those gaps, while a functional resume enables them to portray transferable skills attained through such activities as domestic management and volunteer work.
- Military transitioners entering a different field from the work they did in the military.
- Job-seekers whose predominate or most relevant experience has been unpaid, such as volunteer work or college activities (coursework, class projects, extracurricular organizations, and sports).
- Those who performed very similar activities throughout their past jobs who want to avoid repeating those activities in a chronological job listing.
- Job-seekers looking for a position for which a chronological listing would make them look "overqualified."
- Older workers seeking to deemphasize a lengthy job history.
If you can look at a chronological resume without a stated career objective and know exactly what field the jobseeker is headed toward and would be good at, then the chronological format probably is working just fine. But if you can't guess what the jobseeker wants to do and would be good at by looking at the chronology of past jobs, a functional format may be indicated.
In another article (Strategic Portrayal of Transferable Skills is a Vital Job-search Technique), we talked about a job-changer who wanted to break out of clerical work and get into sales. On her old resume, her skills were listed reverse chronologically, focusing on clerical/secretarial/server aspects. But on her new resume, her experience was arranged around skills clusters related to the new sales career she sought to enter - interpersonal and teamwork skills; customer-service and sales skills; management and supervisory skills; quantitative skills; and computer skills. Click here for another sample of a functional resume.
The functional format also can work well for college students because it allows skills attained from experiences other than paid employment to be listed within the skills clusters. For example, one student chose leadership as one of her skills clusters, and she listed the following supporting experiences, none of them paid employment:
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Leadership
- Selected as president-elect of Omicron Delta Kappa honorary and vice president of Phi Eta Sigma honorary
- Acquainted new students with campus as orientation leader
- Serve as president of residence hall on Residence Hall Council
- Function as vice president for intellectual development and assistant recruitment chair for social sorority
It's true that functional formats have been the subject of some employer backlash is recent years. Some employers are unaccustomed to the functional format, and they may become confused or even irritated by functional resumes. Recruiters/headhunters particularly disdain functional formats, so this approach should never be used if you are primarily targeting recruiters with your job search. Employers in conservative fields, such as banking, finance, and law are not big fans of functional formats, nor are international employers. Functional formats also are not acceptable on many online job boards.
Some employers like to know what you did in each job. One solution is to structure your resume in a mostly functional format but include a bare-bones work history in reverse chronological order, creating what is variously known as a chrono-functional, hybrid, or combination format. Such a work-history section need include only job title, name and location of employer, and dates of employment. You don't need to list what you did in each job because that information already is listed in your functional section.
To make your functional resume as reader-friendly as possible for employers, include as much context as you can within each functional description. That way, the employer has a better idea of which skill aligns with which job. In the above leadership-skills example, for instance, the student tells where she demonstrated each skill, thus making helping the employer connect her skills with the experience that produced those skills.
If you're unsure whether a functional resume is right for you, try it both ways and show the two formats to people in the field you wish to enter. See which one they feel presents your skills more effectively.
Questions about some of the terminology used in this article? Get more information (definitions and links) on key college, career, and job-search terms by going to our Job-Seeker's Glossary of Job-Hunting Terms.
Katharine Hansen, Ph.D., creative director and associate
publisher of Quintessential Careers, is an educator, author,
and blogger who provides content for Quintessential Careers,
edits QuintZine,
an electronic newsletter for jobseekers, and blogs about storytelling
in the job search at A Storied
Career. Katharine, who earned her PhD in organizational behavior
from Union Institute & University, Cincinnati, OH, is author of Dynamic
Cover Letters for New Graduates and A Foot in the Door: Networking
Your Way into the Hidden Job Market (both published by Ten Speed Press),
as well as Top Notch Executive Resumes (Career Press); and with
Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D., Dynamic Cover Letters, Write Your
Way to a Higher GPA (Ten Speed), and The Complete Idiot's Guide
to Study Skills (Alpha). Visit her
personal Website
or reach her by e-mail at
kathy(at)quintcareers.com.
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