Résumé Help: How to Describe Your Current Position

You nailed the profile.  You’ve done a terrific job of showcasing your top nine core competencies.  Now, you must back up your promises by writing about the scope of your responsibility and showcasing your top achievement in each position.  A big part of that is defining and quantifying that experience.  Candidates often get confused when writing their current position.  When is it proper to use past tense for a current position?  Can you have past and present tenses in one job?  That’s part of the issue that today’s sample candidate faced.   Here’s a look at his attempt at explaining his current job: 

You can see that the tenses are not consistent.  Here is the way to remember tense selection for a current job.  Always write about the scope of your responsibility and major job functions in an overview paragraph.  Write those things in present tense because they are ongoing.  Next, create a bulleted list of accomplishments.  Because accomplishments have been accomplished, the items in the bulleted list in past tense.  Now, some ask this: “What if it is an accomplishment that I am continuing to do?”  The answer is that even if it is an accomplishment that you are repeating, it is still an accomplishment and in past tense.  Anything bulleted is past and the opening overview is in present tense.

Let’s take a look at today’s sample after a rewrite.  We added more detail of his scope, responsibilities, and accomplishments.  The verbs have been corrected and the format updated to distinguish the overview from the accomplishments.

At a glance, you can identify the elements of this data block. It flows well. The overview is easily discerned from the accomplishments.