~ Become a mentor and support someone else’s knowledge growth. Knowing that you have facilitated or contributed to another person’s journey of knowledge enhancement can be extremely rewarding.

~ Write articles for a publication in your industry – a great way to portray your expertise and raise your credibility and profile among your peers.

~ Offer your services within family/associates’ businesses either on a voluntary or paid basis. Not only will you be contributing to overall running of their business, but ensuring you skills remain up-to-date.

There are also various techniques you can use when developing your resume in order to draw attention away from potential gaps.

~ Rather than presenting your resume in a reverse chronological format (which is most common) providing contact details and professional experience with most recent at forefront, try combination or functional formats, which list your transferable skills, competencies and accomplishments relevant to position at forefront. This way you are demonstrating at outset what you can contribute to position.

~ Another strategy is to omit months when providing dates, so that instead of stating 10/1997 – 5/2002, you would just write 1997 – 2002.

~ List any education or professional development courses at forefront as this will demonstrate your initiative and commitment to expanding your knowledge.

~ Treat consulting, assignments, or self-employment as professional experience, as with any voluntary work performed within community or even for family business. There is no need to disclose that this was unpaid, nor even fact that you were related to manager; only concentrate on your accountabilities and accomplishments.

Your job search should be treated as your full-time job and each day should be organized and prioritized with time allocated to sourcing suitable positions, sending off applications, following up, and continually working and expanding your network of contacts to maximize your overall job search campaign.

Maintain your health, physical fitness and personal appearance to ensure your positivity and enthusiasm do not diminish. Therefore, when finally called into an interview, you will not bring with you a blanket of self-doubt and disenchantment. During interview remember to portray all of relevant experience and achievements (gained through above strategies) with enthusiasm, while demonstrating your ability to continue contributing your expertise toward ongoing success of their company.

~ Identify challenges you overcame; action or solution you undertook to alleviate challenge; and (quantifiable) result, and script into a powerfully written statement. For instance:

Challenge: Staff turnover high, performance levels extremely poor, with overall costs to recruit and train new staff high.

Action: Developed staff monitoring and incentive programs; implemented staff training programs.

Result: Increased staff knowledge base; decreased staff turnover by 66.7%; increased staff morale and collaboration; increased productivity levels by 77%.

Then by incorporating a number of action words, above can be written as:

Enhanced staff morale; optimized productivity levels by 77%; and reduced staff turnover by 66.7% through implementation of strategic monitoring and incentive programs.

Notice deliberate detailing of quantifiable results at forefront, followed by method in which this accomplishment was obtained.

~ Ensure your document is consistent in its formatting; if you bold a position title, bold all job titles throughout your document. Make certain your overall document is well structured (plenty of white space), and aesthetically pleasing (professional headings and layout).

~ Refrain from providing details of every single position you have ever had. As a guide, generally last 5 – 10 years is appropriate (if position being applied for is relevant to what you have been doing), with a maximum of about 15 years.

~ For far greater impact when identifying your professional experience, create a strategically written paragraph outlining your main accountabilities (remembering to incorporate attention grabbing action words), followed by a bulleted list of achievements.

~ Lastly, edit, edit, and edit again. Then ask a family member or friend to read through document to ensure your career-marketing document is error free.