The struggle is real. After lots of thought, deliberation, and “aha” moments, you’ve started looking for a new job. But before beginning this journey, you’ll have to face the job seeker’s rite of passage: writing or updating your resume.
As a career coach (and former corporate recruiter) who’s been penning resumes since college, I’m all too familiar with the career conundrums resumes cause—from what resume format to use to whether you should submit your resume as a Word doc or PDF, I’ve heard them all.
If you’ve been in the workforce for a while, you might wonder: How far back should a resume go? Why shouldn’t you include all of your experience? What amount of work history is enough to convince a recruiter or hiring manager you’ve got the chops for the role but is not so much they don’t know how to make sense of it all? Well, the answer to this career difficulty is: It’s complicated. Cheap resume services.
Generally, your resume should go back no more than 10 to 15 years. However, every applicant is different, and so is every resume, and there are a few other rules of thumb that can serve as a GPS as you decide how far back your resume should go.
Why Shouldn’t You List Your Entire Work History on a Resume?
There are a few reasons why you might not want to include every job you’ve ever had on a resume, especially as your career bypasses that 10- to 15-year mark, and you should keep these in mind as you decide what’s best for your resume. You’ll want to:
Stick to the Most Relevant Information
Why 10 to 15 years, you ask? Well, that’s the timeframe recruiters and employers perceive as most relevant. Recruiters aren’t interested in your accomplishments as an entry-level employee if you’ve been in the field for 20 years. And even if you’re early in your career, they don’t necessarily need to know about a paper route on a resume slated for a tech position.
Your resume should be a high-level summary of your relevant professional accomplishments, not a dissertation of all your jobs and responsibilities since middle school. Recruiters and hiring managers want to quickly see why you’re the right person for this job, and your experience in the past decade or so is most likely the reason. So think twice before you let non-essential information take up real estate on your resume. Instead, use that space to highlight applicable achievements, experiences, and positions that more closely align with the jobs you’re targeting.
Keep Things Brief
If you keep your experience contained to the last 10 to 15 years, it’s also easier for recruiters to review your work history with a cursory glance over your resume. As you progress in your career, it’s OK for your resume to stretch to two pages—but more than that will be too long for a recruiter to take in quickly, and they might even skip it entirely. So while you may feel a little shortchanged, lopping off your years of sweat equity, you’ll be more likely to make it past that first look if you trim your experience timeline.
Avoid Age Discrimination
Unfortunately, age discrimination in hiring isn’t an urban legend, and having too many years of experience on your resume could fast-track it to the rejection pile. You see, it’s common for hiring managers to look at resumes with 20+ years of experience and assume the candidate is too expensive, may not feel challenged enough, or is otherwise too seasoned for consideration. So trust me when I tell you that age-proofing your resume is suitable for your job search and limiting your experience to only the most relevant and recent is a great place to start.
So, How Far Back Should Your Resume Go?
The answer varies depending on your situation. But there are two key factors: how long you’ve been in the employment game and how that experience aligns with your current job targets.
You can include your professional, academic, and personal experiences and achievements from high school and college. But the key is that you’ll want to highlight your transferable skills. Demonstrate how you used leadership, collaboration, problem-solving, communication, and time management skills in related class projects, internships, volunteer work, leadership roles, sports, passion projects, or part-time jobs. Just make sure you’re being selective. Before you add something, ask yourself if participating in that car wash fundraiser would move the needle for a copywriter position (it might if you wrote the social media messaging), then act accordingly.
Young Professionals (Two to Five Years of Experience)
At this point, you have enough work experience under your belt to leave college courses, projects, awards, and GPAs off your brag sheet. Employers are no longer interested in your college activities unless you have an outstanding long-term job or highly relevant internship with a severe name-drop appeal. Stick to your post-grad experience. But remember that post-grad experiences don’t all have to come from your nine-to-five job. Enhance your resume by demonstrating your professional prowess outside of work. Use volunteer experiences, leadership roles, side hustles, and professional organizations and affiliations to add personality instead of years to your work history.
Mid-Level and Experienced Professionals (More Than Five Years of Experience)
After you’ve hit the five-year mark, you should focus on pertinent roles and responsibilities that will enhance your qualifications for your next career move. This may mean de-emphasizing or even omitting early-professional and part-time positions and elevating more relevant work experiences as the primary focus, perhaps with more detail.
As you get even further into your career, that “10 to 15 years” rule will start to kick in, and you can use it as a guide when debating whether to keep a position on your resume. You should also consider if your experience warrants a two-page resume, but keep in mind how relevant each entry and bullet point you’re including actually is.
Once you have more job titles under your belt, you might consider splitting your work experience into two separate sections:
Related Experience: Include the roles and responsibilities closely associated with your job search targets with detailed bullets highlighting your accomplishments. The key is making relevancy and transferable skills the focal point of your resume content. If you have relevant experience that you need to include outside of the last 10 to 15 years—if you’re making a career change, for instance—you can list it here.
Other Experience: List unrelated positions within the last 10 to 15 years without descriptions or bullet points, so there are no visible gaps on your resume.
Doing this will keep your most relevant experience front and center, so a recruiter doesn’t have to go hunting for it in a more extensive career history.