Your Resume: Create a Master Resume with a Comprehensive Listing of Your Experiences to Help Streamline Your Resume Creation Process

Resume writing: Deciding what to include in your resume can seem like an impossible task! While you may not believe it as this moment, you’ve done a lot of things in your life. And pretty much anything you’ve ever attempted, learned, and experienced may come in handy as you create resumes. For this reason, it’s useful to review and document all of the pieces of your background so that you have as potential content for your resumes.

One way to look at this step in the process is that you’re taking an inventory of everything you own in your “experience wardrobe.” For instance, you have a collection of pants, shirts, underwear, socks, accessories, and so on in your closet, dresser, and maybe also in storage. You’ve been hanging on to all of those items because at some point, every item in that wardrobe may be useful to you, depending on the occasion, right? Similarly, every item in your experience wardrobe may also come in handy, depending on the resume you need to write. Here’s how to create a written inventory of all of those items you may want to refer to as you develop various resume documents.

1. Gather Any Master Resume Information Already Available to You

Chances are, you may already have much of your experience wardrobe documented. As a first step, pull together any of former versions of your resume or performance reviews from current and previous positions that you may have in your files.

2. Create a Rough Outline of Your Professional History to Date as Content for your Master Experience Resume Document

As a first step in developing your master experience resume document, I want you to make a rough outline of your school and work history. It doesn’t matter in which order you write this outline. It won’t really matter when it comes to using this information in future resumes. Some people like to begin from their most current position, and work backwards, while other people prefer to begin with high school, and work forward from there. Here’s mine as an example, working from high school forwards:

Graduated from Bennett Sr. High School in Salisbury, MD, 1980
While in high school, worked as a lifeguard at Canal Woods swim club, and also at Gino’s and Friendly’s restaurants.
Completed my freshmen year in college at Randolph Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, VA, then transferred to University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
Worked in the cafeteria at UT and also landed a job as a specialist in the complaint department for the 1988 World’s Fair. Also had a job working as a graphic artist for a printer (can’t remember the name of the place) and selling ads for the UT newspaper.
Graduated from UT with a degree in communications in 1984, and moved to NH.
Landed a job as a copywriter with First Software, a software distribution company in MA. Worked there for about 3 years.
Got a job with Raster Technologies as a marketing communications specialist. Worked there for a few years.
Took the same kind of job with Numerix. Worked there for about two years, and then the company was acquired by Alliant Computers. Then Alliant Computers was acquired by Mercury Computer Systems, and I got promoted to Marketing Communications Manager.
Worked there for about three years, and decided I wanted to make a career change. I was writing resumes for colleagues at that time.
Left my job in marketing and went to graduate school at Colorado State University to earn my masters degree in career counseling. Learned more about resume writing, too.
While in school, worked as a research assistant for Dr. Judy W. on a project for the Poudre Transition Center. Also held a part time job in as a copywriter for the housing department at CSU.
Finished my masters degree in 1993 and tried to start my own business presenting workshops on how to make career changes. It failed quickly.
Went to work for Bernard Haldane Associates as a career advisor. Worked there for three years. Wrote resumes as part of my job responsibilities.
Opened my own career counseling practice in 1998. Been doing the same work ever since. Writing master experience resume documents with clients is part of what services I offer.
Also volunteer at my children’s schools, church, and local community organizations.

This top-level review of my professional experiences took me about 15 minutes to write, and provides a great database of information that I can access for resume writing in the future. As you can see, I didn’t include dates for all of my experiences, because right now I can’t remember them (but if I needed to, I could go back and figure them out.) This first step is just a rough sketch of what I’ve been doing since high school.

3. Add More Details to Your Outline

Now, add some detail to your rough outline, listing important responsibilities and experiences, particularly for those situations that were especially important and meaningful to you. The more details you add, the better, because it will make developing resumes in the future a simple cut and paste process.

With this step, you can get as detailed as you want. You may want to jot down every responsibility you can recall, along with significant projects and accomplishments, all to help you write effective targeted resumes in the future. Or you may just want to write a few sentences.

For those details you can recall, you may want to include this type of information in your master experience resume document:

Specific job responsibilities
Noteworthy projects you handled
Promotions, degrees, certificates, and awards you received
Classes or training programs you took that you particularly enjoyed and did well with
Achievements or results especially important to you or to your employer
Technologies and processes you learned
People you worked for

That’s it! You’ve created your master experiences inventory to help you with resume writing! (Wasn’t too tough, was it?) Keep it handy as you may need to refer to it throughout your resume development process.

Excerpted and adapted from “Career Coward’s Guide to Resumes” by Katy Piotrowski, M.Ed.