Resumes are one-to-two page products, a bit longer if you are published, that should quickly convince a potential employer that you are the best fit for a job. If condensing however-many-years into 1–2 pages is not a difficult enough task, the resume that will win over your ideal employer at one point in your career is not necessarily the same resume that will win over another ideal employer at a different time. The highlights from a past position that are important for one job may be irrelevant to another later in your career. However, the later job may be interested in a completely different achievement from that same prior job.
Pulling that past achievement into a new resume, after leaving it off of past ones, may be crucial to securing a new job. So how do you remember those past achievements after leaving them off of previous iterations of your resume?
Enter the base resume. A base resume is a resume that lists all of your potentially relevant achievements from prior jobs and experiences. It includes the bullet points you left off of the resume you submitted to your current employer. It is a career-long ongoing list of accomplishments that exceeds the one-to-two page rule and keeps getting longer as your career progresses.
Why keep this experience list? Back in 2015, my resume had six bullet points about my achievements teaching secondary mathematics. My resume now has one or two bullet points about the same job. Since my statistics background and ability to develop processes is important at my current job, I generally use bullet points that emphasize (a) I know statistics well enough to teach it and (b) I am organized enough to plan an entire curriculum and lead others to incorporate it. That bullet point looks like this: “Created a school-wide Probability and Statistics curriculum with tests, lessons, projects, and technology.” This shows leadership from the outset of my career, my ability to develop diverse materials to work towards a larger objective, and that I know statistics.
However, that is not the bullet point I use if statistics is not specifically important. If general mathematics knowledge is sufficient, and I want to push the fact that I have experience as an outcome-based educator, I include: “Taught Algebra I, Algebra II, Probability and Statistics, and Trigonometry through culturally responsive lessons and a results-based accountability model that helped students set and achieve academic goals.” This says that I know math and have experience teaching many different topics to many different students. In a situation where math knowledge does not matter at all, like for a rugby coaching gig, I could even focus more on the teaching outcomes and not define the subjects.
There are a number of ways to describe your achievements at any job, and the right way to outline them for one job is not necessarily the right way to outline them for another job. But drawing on past experiences years after the fact is difficult. Instead, get in the habit of listing these accomplishments as you go so you can pick out the best ones as opportunities arise.
Early Career Professionals: Start with a Great Regular Resume
Some honesty to start: It is easier to start a base resume early in your career and continue adding to it than starting one as a mid-career professional. (But there are workarounds!) If you are at the very beginning of your career, you can just start by making a resume. When applying to your first career job, it probably feels difficult to fill an entire page of a resume with notable experience. At this point, your job-application resume and base resume are the same.
To set yourself up for a useful base resume in the future, make sure to create a resume that describes your experience using relevant verbs, quantifiable metrics, and memorable achievements. (If you do not know how to do this, follow that link! It outlines everything you need to create a resume to land your ideal job.) The higher the quality of your initial resume, the less you will need to amend it later in your career.
If you are an early career professional but a bit past the start of your professional career, your next step is to add to that initial resume. After gaining a bit of experience, it can be easy to look at your old resume with embarrassment that you had to include certain information to fill up a page. Your inclination may be to delete information as quickly as possible to make room for your new skills. Stop deleting. Instead, just add your new experiences and achievements to your base resume. Let your resume tip beyond a page in your effort to keep a list of all achievements. On the actual resume you submit to a job, you can delete the experiences that are inconsequential to landing that position. However, those experiences remain on your base resume in perpetuity in case they become relevant ten years from now.
Starting early is lucky because you can continue adding to your base resume for your entire career. As you hop to new jobs or gain new job titles, write down what you accomplished in each role. If you stay in a role longer than two years, make sure you revisit your resume to write down achievements so you do not forget them.
Mid Career Professionals: Collating Your Experience
Say you are a bit farther into your career and could almost certainly not remember the details of your first 9-to-5 office assistant position. This base resume idea sounds great, but it feels impossible at this stage. Creating a base resume is not as easy, and your base resume will likely not be as thorough as if you started your base resume when you were a 22-year-old office assistant. But it is still worth putting one together to the best of your ability so you have it in the event that your dream job appears and requires that niche skill from your office assistant days.
Do not create a base resume by contemplating what you did in your first job for hours. Instead, start by collecting as many past resumes as possible. Even if your resume is vastly different than it used to be, you once had a resume that barely filled a page. Go find it.
If you always edit the same resume document (true for so many folks—you are not alone!) and are convinced that you do not have old resume versions, there are ways to find them. First, check your sent email to see if you have previous versions in your outbox. Any job application that required you to email a resume will have an old version of your resume where more detailed prior experience is listed. Depending on when you held certain positions, you may need to explore the outbox of old email addresses, like college email addresses, to find early experience.
In addition to resumes, these old email applications may have other resources that can help you create a more thorough base resume, particularly if you find the description of your experience lacking in your old resumes. Cover letters, writing samples, or even the emails themselves may outline or allude to achievements at past jobs that you have not thought about in years. Looking back at the time you needed your early experiences to bolster your entire professional capability can trigger memories about your responsibilities in those roles. Finding materials from a variety of points in your career is best, so you can see the various responsibilities you highlighted at each time.
In the event that you deleted all prior emails, resumes, application materials, and any other evidence of past job applications, you may still be able to tap into your connections. If you ever had a friend or professional review or consult about your resume, they may have a copy from the consultation. If you have or had a good relationship with HR professionals at a previous employer, you can reach out to see if they have copies of your resume from when you applied that are saved in their emails or files. Think about all potential times you circulated old resumes to pinpoint who may be good contacts to find a copy.
Finally, if you are someone who prints everything and keeps too many papers around (hi Dad!), explore your filing cabinet or cardboard box of materials to see if you have an old copy of a resume. Even those who do not print everything may have a copy of a resume in a folder that they took to job interviews in the past. This does not apply to everyone, but it is worth investigating if it applies to you.
Do not let perfection hinder you from doing your best. If you can find an old resume from five years ago and a cover letter from when you graduated college 15 years ago but are missing numerous years between, you still have resources to help you create a base resume. Find as much as possible, and do the best you can.
Creating a Base Resume
After gathering all of your past resumes, cover letters, and other resources, compile that information onto your base resume! Starting by copying and pasting by employment experience is sufficient. Just put all of your experience together in one lengthy document.
After collecting all these prior experiences, you may notice that some of your prior experience descriptions are not up to your current standards. After you are done with the copy-paste process (and maybe after a break, depending on how involved your deep dive was to find old resumes), take some time to refine the points you once put on your resume using your current understanding of what makes good resume experience descriptions. Even if you had a great resume in the past, your career may have shifted in a different direction, making a reframing of your experiences and achievements valuable to future resumes.
This may take time. The idea is to use language you would find acceptable today to describe these past accomplishments so you could immediately paste any of those points into a current resume when you find them relevant to a particular job. Revisiting old experiences you have not thought about in years may also make you realize there are some diamonds in your past experiences that became impertinent but are now valuable to your career! This process will help you find those achievements.
Using a Base Resume to Get Any Job
Having a base resume ready to go at any point expedites your ability to apply to a job. When you see your dream job posted, you do not have to think about how you are going to rewrite parts of your resume to make them relevant. You can copy and paste from your base resume to draft the ideal one-to-two page resume for a particular job in a matter of minutes. Constructing tailored resumes becomes easy when you have every achievement of your career listed for you to choose from so you stand out for this particular employer.
One of the core factors that has made my entire career successful is gathering large amounts of data and organizing it to make it easily accessible when I need it. A base resume is how you do that for yourself to optimize your agility when a job posting appears. Whether you have a short base resume as an early career professional that you will add to throughout your career or a lengthy base resume patched together from a bunch of different materials, that resource will help you present yourself better than other applicants. Having a base resume is just another way to prepare yourself for when an opportunity arises.
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