3 Resume Tips for Including Self-Employment

Many people opt to return to the role of employee after a stint working for themselves, or, work in both an employee role AND in their small business as a consultant, freelancer, or owner/operator like I talked about in the recent post Multiple Profit Centers for Job (and Life) Security and Satisfaction.

Adding self employment work to your resume can sometimes be confusing or overwhelming but it doesn’t have to be.

Here’s three simple tips for how to add consultant, freelance, and other work for yourself experience to your resume (and of course, your friendly resume writer, yours truly, would be happy to assist you, too! See the Work with Me, Here page for details!)

1) Treat it as any job – give yourself an applicable, accurate job title, use your company name, list the dates you worked for yourself & the (general) location if it varied.

2)  Focus on the skills you used working for yourself that are most applicable to the employment you seek now.  If you ran your own small graphic design company, for example, and are looking to return to the workplace as a graphic designer or team lead of designers, focus on those design and/or supervisory/leadership skills.  If you also did all your own marketing, accounting, & other business operations you don’t really need to include information on those skills unless they are needed in the job you are applying for.

3)  Secondary focus should be on transferable skills.  More info on that in the former post 7 Transferable Skills & How To Talk About Them

Tags: self employment, self-employed, work at home, work for yourself