You might have a career gap on your resume where you weren’t working or at school. This could be a conscious choice where you needed to take a quick break from work or something that outside forces decided for you.
Now, while many people think that a career gap on a resume is a massive red flag, career gaps are pretty common in the workforce, and it is all about how you handle them that will have an impact on your job.
You can take a career gap for several reasons, and there are also plenty of different ways to handle them as well.
Here are some tips you could try.
Keep Your Career Gap Positive
Sometimes not working is a good thing. Maybe during your time off you learned new skills, started a side business, or overcame a hurdle and grew from the experience. Talk about how you went from a career to a career gap and any personal goals or new aspirations that came from that.
Your career gap can (and should) be framed as a learning experience, and even if everything you learned has nothing to do with the job you are applying for, you can still use the knowledge behind it to your benefit.
Give Context And Tell The Story Of The Gap
Telling the story behind your career gap and giving it some context can be very helpful for your employers. Own the gap and let your employers know why you took it, and talk about the lessons you’ve learned from the gap.
You don’t need to make the gap the star of the resume or go into a ton of detail about it, but you do need to acknowledge it before getting back to your work experience. If you get into a work interview, then your interviewer might ask about the gap and then you can provide some serious context about it.
Focus On Your Work Experience
A career gap doesn’t mean that you can’t do the job, and in fact, it will make all the work experience you do have even more valuable for your potential employer. So make sure that all your work experience is detailed and if your career gap gave you some marketable skills or otherwise supports the work you do, talk about that as well.
Using a Professional Resume Template
Making the rest of your resume look professional is also a great way to keep the focus on your work experience. While your career gap will appear on your resume template and it will be noticed by potential employers, a professional resume template can swing things in your favor. Having a customized resume will help you get a perfect job, and a ResumeBuild resume will be professional and also made for your job.
Don’t be afraid to log into the ResumeBuild and test out creating a resume for your newest job. You might find that your custom resume allows you to become hired even with a few gaps in your employment history.
A Gap Isn’t Terrible
You might not have a perfect employment history that is completely unbroken from one job to the next. However, a career gap isn’t terrible and you don’t need to be super worried about it. Instead, just know that you can work to mitigate the effect that a career gap will have on your resume, and most employers will be very understanding about career gaps as long as you explain the reason for it as well as how the career gap benefited you.