I haven’t taken a serious look at my resume in years. I know you’re supposed to update it every few months, and while I’m sure that’s a great idea, it’s one that I never managed to implement. So every time I have to update my res it’s a painful process.

I had sent out my res a while back and the recruiter told me that contrary to the common advice of ‘keep your resume short’, that mine was in fact too brief and needed to be filled out. Apparently brief is good early career, but if you want to apply for an executive type gig, it needs to have some weight.  So now, not only do I now find myself adding my most recent history (the last five years, basically), I also get to embellish all the stuff I did in the previous ten. Cool, huh?

But here’s the funny part. When I went to describe my next to last job, my responsibilities and accomplishments, I found it quite easy. In fact, it was much easier than the same task for my most recent gig. Why is that? I think it’s because I was so much more engaged in that job six years ago. I really liked what I did then, I liked who I was doing it with, and I thought it was important stuff to do. Not that I did it perfectly, in fact it was a new set of responsibilities for me and I had some real challenges. Nonetheless, it’s clear to me now that I was a much better technology manager then than the one I became in my next gig. I accomplished more, had a greater (positive) impact – all that. There are some other factors that I think contributed – truly enlightened management, a brilliant technical lead, and plenty of dot com dollars, to name a few – but they can’t explain the breadth of the difference.  And it’s not like I got nothing accomplished in the last five years either. In fact I think I did pretty well. But there is a difference in quality that is striking.  And I think a lot of the difference is just the difference between being ‘engaged and driven’, versus ‘trying to make the best of it’. 

Funny what you learn when you take a long deliberate look. 

Maybe I should update my res more often…