Writing Skills and Combination Resumes

The skills resume emphasizes your most important skills, supported by specific examples of how you have used them. This type of resume allows you to use any part of your life history to support your ability to do the job you want.

While skills resumes can be very effective, creating them requires more work. And some employers don’t like them because they can hide a job seeker’s faults (such as job gaps, lack of formal education, or little related work experience) better than a chronological resume can. Still, a skills resume may make sense for you.

Look over the sample resumes that follow for ideas. Notice that one resume includes elements of a skills and a chronological resume. This so-called combination resume makes sense if your previous job history or education and training are positive.