How Working Mothers Can Deal With Career Gap in Their Resume

Women are considered to be better all-rounders as compared to men across the globe. There are a lot of women in the world, who are working as well as taking care of their household responsibilities.

According to a report by Statista, 31 million women with children under 18 years in the United States were working in 2018. 

Being a multitasking individual, every woman faces a time when she organizes things according to her priorities. At that time, usually, the family takes over the profession resulting in a career gap.

For all of the women who have faced such conditions and are willing to step up to grow again, we are here with some guidelines to deal with the career gap while creating a professional resume for stay-at-home mom.

Choose The Right Format

Choosing the right resume format is the first step to make a highly impeccable resume after a long career gap. There are 4 types of resume formats:

• Reverse Chronological Resume Format
• Combination Resume Format
• Functional Resume Format

Being a completely Skill focused resume format, a Functional resume will be the best pick for you. In this, only the Designation, company name, and employment dates without any work details will be placed in the professional experience section.

Instead, you will get a separate section to elaborate on your skills. A functional resume is considered the best pick for all individuals having a career gap in their professional journey.

Highlight Your Skills

Having a strong skill set is the only way to grab a job after a career gap. Hence, polishing your old skillset and upgrading them to new versions will help you a lot in getting rid of this career gap hurdle.

You can make clusters of your skills containing every action you can perform under that. It will help you in grabbing your recruiter’s eyes and might result in getting your resume shortlisted. Bolding keywords will also add value in this section.

Play Intelligently With The Dates

This is the part where a little prudence can benefit you a lot. While writing the professional experience section after a career gap, do not be much expressive about the serving period.

In clear words, we recommend you to showcase only the serving year instead of mentioning the month and year. For example, writing 2015-18 will benefit you more than May ‘15- May ‘18.

Highlight Your Previous Projects & Achievements

Highlighting your previous achievements, awards, and Projects in the resume will also add bonus points during the recruitment process. Showcase all of your achievements along with some details to get the results in your resume.

Make separate sections for Achievements and projects you handled containing the required information. It will make you worthy enough to give a chance. Highlighting essential information and keywords in this section too will have a better impact.

Use Cover Letter to Explain Career Gap

‘Honesty is the best policy’, a common quote with a deep meaning. Just like everyone across the globe, your recruiter will also admire honest words. However, a resume is not the right place to explain your career gap.

Instead, make a separate section in your cover letter to explain the reason for your career gap. Most of the recruiter spends only a few seconds on a resume, hence, explaining the reason in the cover letter will work well for your job hunt.

Key Takeaways

Getting a job after a long career gap is undeniably not a piece of cake as you need a strong reason along with polished skills to get on track again. Here are the highlighting points that can help you in covering up the career gap in your resume:

• Choose the functional format to build your resume
• Highlight your skills and elaborate on them in a separate section
• Mention only your serving years in the professional experience section instead of month and year
• Make separate sections for your previous achievements and projects handled
• Explain the reason for your career gap in the cover letter

Following these points will increase your chances of getting shortlisted after a career gap. Apart from this, we also welcome every other idea to cover the career gap in a resume for better results.  Feel free to use the comment section for sharing new ideas.