For IT leaders working in the public sector, tailoring your resume for private-sector opportunities can be challenging. That was the problem Christina Sewell, CIO at a government agency, encountered in considering next steps for her career.
With over two decades in technology and leadership roles, Sewell, whose identity has been anonymized for this article, was confident her skills and experiences would transfer but felt that her resume might not stand out for industries outside the public sector. Her goal in overhauling her resume was to take it from being a “function-based resume,” rooted in federal terminology to a “standard, industry-driven resume with key metrics and highlights,” she says.
We paired her with Stephen Van Vreede, president, executive resume writer, and coach for ITtechExec.com, to help her craft a versatile resume that accurately reflects her experience and expertise as a CIO and ensures broad appeal beyond the public sector.
Together, Van Vreede and Sewell worked to identify the most relevant career experience for Sewell’s resume, shifting its focus to resonate with industries outside the government, and creating a separate executive biography document to highlight her accomplishments as a leader.
[ Download Sewell’s original and final resumes ]
Condensing decades of experience for resume impact
As an IT executive working on a resume, length can be one of the biggest challenges. Early in your career you might struggle to stretch your experience to a full page, but as you gain more experience, it can be difficult to keep the document under two pages. Sewell’s original resume, at three pages, was too long in her opinion, making it difficult for hiring execs to identify her “key attributes as a leader and a functional expert,” she says.
Despite using a previous executive resume makeover as inspiration for her resume, she struggled to keep it under three pages, unsure what to cut and what to keep, a common challenge for executives. To truly step back and objectively view your career path, a fresh set of eyes can help.
Agreeing with Sewell’s assessment, Van Vreede notes that her original resume “had some good content included” but was “presented in a long laundry list of bullet points that mixed strong achievements with basic job duties.” In an effort to streamline her executive resume, Van Vreede worked to condense Sewell’s experience and accomplishments into more digestible pieces, making it easier for recruiters to quickly get a picture of who Sewell is as a leader in two pages.
In addition to consolidated Sewell’s experience in the executive experience section, Van Vreede, in Sewell’s final resume, highlighted certain accomplishments in bold to help readers identify the most relevant experiences and highlights of her career before diving into more information about her credentials if something catches their eye.
Van Vreede also highlighted Sewell’s job titles and main responsibilities for each role in gray at the top of the experience section. This can help draw readers in, giving a few high-level touchpoints that help recruiters quickly identify whether she’s a good fit for the role in question.
Experience that falls outside her main career path to CIO is combined at the bottom of the resume, under a section called “Select consulting, strategic advisory, and sales executive experience,” where recruiters can see the early experience that helped jumpstart Sewell’s career in tech without taking up too much real estate in the document.
The value of an executive biography
Van Vreede also helped cut down Sewell’s resume by introducing a separate document called an executive biography. In this one-page document, Van Vreede includes a personalized professional biography of Sewell along with visuals to show her career progression. The executive biography is essentially a snapshot of her resume, highlighting quickly her qualifications and strengths.
Van Vreede’s timeline graphic at the top of the page, complete with logos for Sewell’s employers at each stage, not only shows her career progression visually, but helps demonstrate that, having made the shift from the private to public sector, she’s capable of making the transition back again.
In a highlighted box to the right of Sewell’s executive biography, Van Vreede emphasizes highlights of Sewell’s career, such as her leadership qualifications, the scope of her past leadership responsibilities, and direct results she has delivered in leadership roles. The biography itself explains Sewell’s path to CIO, including her rapid progression through the ranks and how her private sector experience helped inform her current public sector role.
This executive biography offers an up-to-date picture of where Sewell is in her career, how she got there, and all the relevant knowledge and experience that makes her a good candidate for future roles. Whether recruiters look at the executive biography first or the resume, they will have a clear picture of who Sewell is as a leader and how her leadership style can benefit a company.
[ Download Sewell’s executive biography and resumes ]
Creating a document for a new industry
Despite the bulk of her experience being in a government role, Sewell also had extensive experience in the private sector as well. Highlighting this private-sector experience to demonstrate that she can transfer her knowledge and expertise to a new industry will be important in making the transition back again.
As for her original resume, Sewell says she fell into a common trap for industry-specific CVs by including “too many terms that were technical in nature or acronyms that didn’t translate well from sector to sector.” This is a common pitfall of tech resumes — candidates with technical experience who don’t consider adjusting their language for non-technical recruiters and CEOs who might be reading the document.
Making sure your resume is easily understood by anyone who reads it is important, and typically it’s recruiters who vet your resume first. So you want to be mindful of the verbiage you use, ensuring you aren’t alienating those reading your resume, especially at an early stage.
VanvVreede was able to help Sewell “translate” the resume and focus on including content that would “get recruiters attention,” while also remaining concise, she says. Rather than listing out specific skillsets such as “application development, IT infrastructure, data modernization, enterprise architecture,” and other technology-specific terminology, Van Vreede instead focused on results.
In the final resume, Van Vreede points to how Sewell has driven actionable results thanks to her skillsets in those areas — highlighting cost savings in a multi-cloud strategy, finalizing a $3B contract for data modernization, and generating billions in cost savings through digital transformation. Another example is that Sewell rapidly scaled her team for fully remote and hybrid schedules, with 24/7 availability for over 26,000 workers during the pandemic.
These direct results of her efforts clearly demonstrate she has the right skills and expertise to get the job done. Rather than just listing her skills in bullet points, Van Vreede points to her skills by centering her accomplishments and direct business results derived from those skillsets. This is a great way to make your resume approachable, while avoiding technical jargon, and clearly demonstrating that you are skilled in your role.
The end result
In addition to condensing Sewell’s resume and introducing a separate executive biography, Van Vreede worked to change the aesthetics of Sewell’s resume as well, creating a streamlined and neutral document that draws the eye to the most critical information throughout the document, as finding the right aesthetic and format for your resume is also important at the executive stage of your career.
Format-wise, Sewell’s original resume was off to a good start, with headers and bulleted lists that just needed better organization to reflect how Sewell can deliver actionable results as a CIO, with a decreased focus on the technical and hard skills she has. As a leader, it’s critical to demonstrate your skills through business results, which can go a long way in highlighting your success as a leader.
“The new resume focuses on business impact first and foremost. Most CEOs don’t care that you can develop a three-year cybersecurity plan or a five-year IT strategy, rather how well you execute on the strategies you create, and the value generated for the business,” says Van Vreede.
Sewell found Van Vreede to be “very engaging and supportive” while offering helpful suggestions to transform the resume even based on a short description of what she wanted. Sewell ultimately felt that it was a valuable process and would recommend using an expert to any leader. Resume experts can help you cut through the noise, identify your strengths, and transform your resume to help you get the job you want.
[ Download Sewell’s original and final resumes ]