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An Updated Resumé Is an Employee's Best Friend
The resumé is one of the fundamental tools of the jobhunter. It provides a quick overview of your qualifications, and along with the cover letter that accompanies it, it may well determine whether you will even get an interview. If your resumé does not show you in the best possible light, companies will not even give you the time of day.
Yet many employees do not give their resumé a thought until they actually need it again. If they're lucky, they'll still have a copy of their old one moldering in an odd folder in their hard drive, or a hard copy in a file cabinet, left over from the job search for their current job. Many employees do not even have that much when they suddenly discover they need to have a current one.
Caught by Surprise
The person who has just been let go from a position is in a particular disadvantage in preparing a new resumé. He or she is still in shock emotionally at having one of the most fundamental parts of life ripped from under his or her feet. It will be very difficult to concentrate and think logically at this point, let alone remember clearly the progression of past jobs and be able to present them in a coherent fashion. Important job responsibilities may well be glossed over or forgotten altogether, leading potential employers to see the job-seeker as less qualified than he or she is in fact.
Worse, trying to prepare a resumé after you have been let go, particularly if the layoff is with no notice and you are escorted out the building immediately afterward, means that you are doing it without access to many important resources. You may not have been able to take files with you that contained letters of commendation or other records of your promotions and job success. It will be harder to contact former coworkers and supervisors to verify your recollections of exactly when you made certain key changes.
Keeping the Resumé Up-to-Date
Ideally you should update your resumé on a regular basis, or at least every time there are significant changes in your job title, description, or duties. If you have not, you should certainly make it a priority to update it immediately, particularly if there are signs that there may be major personnel changes. By doing so, you will need only make minor changes to your resumé when you actually begin looking for a job.
Regularly updating your resumé can provide you with awareness of how you are progressing on your long-term career goals. Even if you are not faced with an immediate layoff, allowing yourself to stagnate can put you in danger of being deemed superfluous when it comes time to prune the deadwood. When you update your resumé, consider whether you are showing a pattern of consistent growth and if not, what you can do to rectify that. Are you fulfilling all of the responsibilities in your job description, or are you cherry-picking only the ones you enjoy and leaving the rest for your colleagues to pick up the slack?
When you update your resumé on a regular basis, you will also be more aware of what you are actually doing as opposed to what your job description says that you are supposed to be doing. If this is the case, it is time to consider why it should be so. Have you slipped away from your actual job description in order to pursue pet projects, or are your supervisors continually giving you tasks which have nothing to do with what you are actually supposed to be doing. If either is happening, it is time to make a serious reassessment of what you are doing. Your continued employment may well depend upon it.
Your Employment Lifeline
When your employment situation becomes perilous, having an up-to-date resumé at hand and ready to show on a moment's notice may be key to your economic future. Whether it is to demonstrate to your own supervisors that you really are a valuable employee or whether it is to convince a new employer to take you on, having a resumé that shows you in the best possible light may well be essential to your economic future.
