I've been thinking about the future in terms of my career recently. My kids are getting older and soon I will feel comfortable leaving them alone at home for a few hours so I can pursue the full-time career I put on hold when my daughter was born. I had a career I loved in publishing in my "previous life." I started off as a project manager then as the years went on, I did design and moved to a different department and started doing some marketing for them. And before that was another job that I wasn't crazy about, but I felt I did pretty well with what I had.
So anyway, I thought it was time to dust off the resume and start thinking about the upcoming year(s) and what I wanted to do with my life. After my stay-at-home mom stint, I started working the last three+ years at something I found very fulfilling but not a "career" (as my bank account will tell you). For two years I worked with ENL students, then last year and now this one with special needs kids. I wanted to add that to the resume and update all of my other older job stuff on there. I know the rules of resumes have changed over the years and I didn't want to start off looking for my new career with a horribly outdated resume. I contacted a young friend who I knew had a knack for jazzing up resumes that actually get you phone calls for interviews. I was worried that my resume sucked… that there was nothing interesting on it. That I wouldn't be able to compete with people who didn't take time out of the rat race to be a mom. I contacted my friend in the hopes that she could doctor it up to make me look good. (Ask any of my friends- I can be horribly insecure!!!) So I send my friend my resume and pray that she won't laugh at my old ass and think I'm incredibly lame and react like:
Then I get a response from her after she had time to look it over… "Wow, this is really impressive!" That was so not the response I thought I'd get. I thought I'd hear "Damn this is going to take me all weekend and then some to spice this up!" So she did polish it off a bit- took some older job stuff off, changed a bit of the formatting, used a different, clean font but that's about it. So I started to REALLY look at my resume. Promotions, corporate awards, an award I was given by co-workers, a deal that I made on my own that had saved my department alone thousands of dollars just on the art budget, and so on and so on. And then looking at what I've done while working with these students the last few years. The connections I've made, the kids I've helped. Plus the volunteer work that I've done locally over the years, community relations, advertising, etc. And lastly, the small home-based business I created and have done very well with! It made me realize that I was selling myself short. After being "MOM" for 11 years, I forgot that I'm my own person too, and damn I'm AWESOME!!! :o) I then sent out the resume to a few "professional" friends for any tips and suggestions and got positive feedback as well from people who never knew me in my professional life but were not surprised by what they read.
I sure wish I could always see myself the way that others do. Not sure why we tend to sell ourselves short.
Now all I have to say about myself is:
