How to cover for my employment gap through my side projects?

Question

I resigned from a software company recently to pursue my passion for developing web applications. After I've resigned I started working on building several side projects each day. I worked on making them as good as possible and learned a lot of things along the way. Now I am ready to contribute on a professional platform by joining a company and taking on new role as a web developer. But I've got employment gap of ~5 months during which I was working on my projects.

How do I effectively cover for this gap since the work I was doing wasn't exactly freelance as well? It was just me learning and building stuff during this gap. How do I put it on my resume so that my gap can be negated?

EDIT: I looked at this question How to List Personal/Side Projects as a Work Experience in Resume but I just need more opinions on how to effectively convey it to the employer through my resume?

Answer 1

idk that that employment gap necessarily needs to be explained on your resume. If prospective employers want to know about it then they can ask about it.

I mean, people do take employment gaps, for various reasons:

• maybe they had some money saved up and wanted to travel the world
• maybe someone close to them died and they just needed time to find themselves. more than a normal bereavement period would allow for.
• maybe they had an idea for a startup and pursued it and things ultimately didn't work out
• maybe they had a kid and wanted to spend more time with their newborn than their companies maternity / paternity policies allowed
• or maybe, as in your case, they just wanted to pursue their own non-for-profit projects for a while

Most of the above scenarios ought not be elaborated upon in a resume as they're simply not relevant.

That said, on LinkedIn there's a Projects section. This is where you can mention your personal projects. It's not heavily emphasized on LinkedIn but on a paper resume you could adapt that idea and put it in a section right under Employment History.

Another alternative: you could just discuss it your cover letter, if you do one. eg. why you took that time, what goals you set for yourself at the onset and how well you achieved those goals.

Answer 2

One of the following two options should suffice:

• Have a separate section for your side projects / open source projects, and list them there. Then under your employment history, you can write something like:

  Jan 2019-June 2019, took a 6 month hiatus from paid employment to focus on improving the quality of my side projects; specifically .

• Alternatively, if you can, and especially if your employment history spans more than a few years - just list the years by each job rather than the months, then don't mention the gap at all.