Most resumes are arranged chronologically, around a candidate’s job history (listing jobs from most to least recent). These resumes are called, appropriately, chronological resumes, and are industry standard in the IT field. Sometimes, however, a functional resume might be more appropriate.
This article will describe functional resumes, and who might need one.
What is a Functional Resume?
A functional resume is arranged around skill sets — the functions of a job the candidate can perform. There are lots of options for categories. Sometimes you’ll use hard skill sets that show off technical prowess (like virtualization, desktop operating systems, or data protection) and sometimes soft skill traits, like project management or interpersonal skills. The actual companies worked for are then listed at the bottom of the resume, sometimes with dates and sometimes without.
Other than their organization (which is actually a fairly striking difference) many conventions of both types of resumes are the same. Each type of resume:
- Targets its objective appropriately
- Includes both education and work experience
- Uses bullet points to describe background
Functional resumes sometimes carry risk. They raise instant questions about a candidate’s background (“Why isn’t this candidate using a chronological resume?” a hiring manager might ask) and without the architecture of a job history they can be challenging to organize. They can also be trickier for a reader, who must quickly assemble the information into a coherent portrait of the candidate.
Having said that, functional resumes are useful in specific circumstances.
Who Needs a Functional Resume?
So who might need a functional resume? Functional resumes work best for career changers, people re-entering the workforce and those leaving the military.
- Career changers — This doesn’t refer to people switching jobs within an existing field — from an employee to a manager, for example — but instead to more radical career shifts, like from a career managing a restaurant for five years to one writing database code.
- People Re-Entering the Workforce — Sometimes, if you haven’t worked in several years (say, because of raising children or going through medical issues) a functional resume can camouflage the gap. This strategy can be especially strong if you picked up skills during your time off that didn’t have a professional affiliation — like through volunteer work.
- People Leaving the Military — Transitioning from military to civilian life can be challenging. On the professional front, it requires you to package skills learned in military service in a way that makes sense in the non-military world, while not violating (potentially) any disclosure agreements. A functional resume can help you organize military experience, and draw exact connections to your goals as a civilian professional.
These situations will be rare. There is, however, one other situation that might be significantly more common …
Functional Resumes for IT Contractors or Consultants
A lot of work in IT right now is contract or consultant based, with jobs lasting anywhere from a few days to a year. Current economic realities make many companies skittish about hiring people full-time, if they are even in a position to do so. Additionally, much IT work is by nature temporary; you get contracted to write a manual, upgrade a website, build a database, write some code, or develop a mobile ap (among other things). But once the work is complete, you and the company often go your separate ways.
There are advantages to contracting, of course. You can work on a variety of projects, and sometimes command a higher job or hourly rate, to offset the temporary nature of the work. Disadvantages, though, are that the work can sometimes be intermittent, which creates a related challenge when writing a resume.
If you have three year’s worth of contract jobs lasting an average of, say, two months each, that gives you a potential total of almost twenty actual employers and companies, which could quickly get cumbersome if listed chronologically. Additionally, chronological organization makes it harder to showcase elements of your background that are the most impressive, or most relevant.
A functional resume can minimize these difficulties, helping you present a diverse or scattered job history in a way that emphasizes the breadth of your experience, rather than making you look like a job-hopper. In another circumstance, a functional resume can lend focus and accessibility to a background, helping you seem capable of being a specialist in addition to a generalist. In either case, the functional resume could smooth over those awkward times in your consultant’s career where you aren’t working that consistently.
Do I Have to Use a Functional Resume?
Of course not. Every resume is different, and you shouldn’t feel obligated to package your resume a certain way. If you did all your contracting under the guise of your own freelance company, for example, you could potentially arrange your resume with that company being the main organizational principle, and dodge the whole issue altogether.
Think of a functional resume as just one of many options when writing your IT Resume, particularly if you’re in one of the situations described above.
Discussion
No comments or trackbacks for “What is a Functional Resume and Do You Need One?”Post a comment