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I am now updating my creative resume for my job prospects. I wanted to highlight my work experience and my skills, but normally, I would have to choose either skills or work experience to show on the first page of my resume. So I explored depicting both of them in a timeline starting from my most recent employment.

I have learned certain technologies from my would-be previous employer, all of which have StackOverflow followings. The same goes from my previous employers. Case in point. I have learned about SVN from my previous employer, then I had to learn Retrofit for a project with my current employer.

Is it ethical/professional that I associate my acquired skills with every point of my employment history? Because if not, I'll simply put my skills in a picture above my employment history. Thanks!

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    Why would they care when you acquired a skill?
    – paparazzo
    May 14, 2016 at 9:38
  • I don't know for sure. But some of them do ask when I learned this particular technology.
    – Jenny Tengson Mandani
    May 14, 2016 at 10:13
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    You are supposed to look after yourself and your career, which means using every job to acquire new skills, if possible. Nothing wrong with listing what skills you gained together with the job.
    – gnasher729
    May 14, 2016 at 11:27
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    How you organize your resume is not an ethical question.
    – Brandin
    May 14, 2016 at 13:42
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    @Brandin I would disagree. Ethical decisions do apply to business communication, which I would say includes a resume. Making a decision on how to present content in a manner that doesn't give false impressions is both a communication and ethical question.
    – Thomas Owens
    May 14, 2016 at 14:38

2 Answers 2

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As an interviewer, I've found it helpful to see what skills are associated with each job. It lets me know how up-to-date your skills are. For example, if I'm looking for someone with Java experience, but their last job or project that uses Java was in 2004, they may not be as familiar with the new features introduced since then. Another example would be someone who used a technology for one class in school versus having work experience or a few public projects using that same technology.

Knowing how up-to-date their skills are can help me decide between two candidates. It's probably not going to eliminate a candidate, but I may adjust my questions slightly. For example, going back to my Java example, I wouldn't expect someone who last used Java in 2004 to know the details about things like default methods in interfaces and lambda expressions that were introduced in 2014.

If you already have a multi-page resume, I wouldn't worry about a summary or timeline form that you mentioned. Instead, just use a standard resume format - reverse chronological or functional.

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On every role on my CV, after I list the duties I performed, I then list the technologies or skills that I used in that particular job. That way it's clear when and where each skill was acquired, and how current my experience is. I also do have a self-assessed skill list, if someone wants the executive summary of the skills I have. They can then look in the work history as evidence to back up my claims.

It's not a raw "I learned this skill here", but they can see when it first appears on my CV if they really care. Mostly, they want to know if I have recent experience in whatever skill or technology they are most interested in, and under what context they were utilised (or acquired).

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