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How You Can Use Key Success Factors to Build Your ResumeBy: Jim Hasse
Summary:
Here's how I transformed my key success factors into a 1994 resume which eventually led to the work I've been doing for eSight and its members during the last three years. 
The "Hinge"
Key Results Page One Caveats Results In My Critical First Steps in Building a Resume: List Accomplishments, Key Success Factors, I identified my most important accomplishments and the key success factors which helped me succeed in achieving those milestones in my career. In doing that, I followed this eight-step development process:
The "Hinge" If I had to sum up what this exercise taught me, I'd say it identified me as a resource person for defining direction and managing change within an organization. To me, that could be summed up in two words: Gaining Alignment. "Gaining Alignment" became the "hinge" for putting the pieces of my resume together. Using "Gaining Alignment" as a theme, I rearranged my key success factors, skills and qualities, putting the most important first, and pruned them from five to four: Gaining Alignment
Go to Top of Page Key Results I now converted my four key success factors, skills and qualities into four key result areas, using action verbs to succinctly describe essential activities involved in each of the functional experience examples I had previously chosen. For each, I then added more concrete results. So I ended up with one page which highlighted my functional experience like this: Format This one-page statement of my functional experience became the core of my resume, a 17-by-11 sheet of very light gray cover stock folded in half. "Gaining Alignment" (my statement of functional experience above) appeared on the second page. I'll tell you how I handled the first -- and most important -- page in the next section. The fourth page (or backside) of my one-fold pamphlet (resume) I left blank. The third page included these four sections:
Page One I carried the "Gaining Realignment" theme from page two (functional experience) to the front page of my resume by selecting this quotation that defined what those two words meant to me:
Caveats I used my resume as a handout at job fairs and mailed it flat in a 9-by-12 white envelope with my cover letter to prospective employers and contacts for informational interviews. It became the primary tool in my campaign to market myself as a job seeker. Please note I developed this resume in 1994 -- before widespread use of online databases and e-mail delivery of resumes. Since then, I have updated it with fresh examples of functional experience (keeping the same basic structure) and changed its format to fit the needs of targeted submissions, e-mail deliveries and online searches. Yet, the process I followed in developing my resume is, I believe, still relevant. Identify your key success factors, workplace skills and personal qualities and convert them into a one-page statement of concrete results wrapped around your functional experience. Your key search words for databases will pop out of your statement of functional experience. Once you have that core, you can adapt your resume to a wide variety of uses in your marketing campaign for a job that is right for you. Go to Top of Page Results Almost a decade ago, I made a mid-life career change despite having some rather severe disabilities due to cerebral palsy. My journey to a new career started in 1993 when I decided to retire from the job I had with a fast-growing Fortune 500 company. I had worked at that company for almost 28 years. I was part of the senior management staff as a corporate communications vice president and organizational development officer. Here's a quick recap of how I got off the track that probably would have ended with a "40 years of service" gold watch. As it turned out, I received the obligatory retirement watch, but it only has "28 years of service" stamped on its back. 1993 - I attended a presentation by Bernard Haldane Associates and decided to sign on to a three-year commitment. I was the first person with a disability in that regional office to work with a Haldane career counselor. After considerable self-assessment under the guidance of my Haldane career counselor, I decided to use the next six months to establish a home-based consulting business for helping college seniors with disabilities prepare for the realities of the job market. I took a bunch of how-to-start-your-business courses and started writing weekly columns for local newspapers about disability awareness issues -- material I thought would come in handy for the in-person campus-to-campus "ready for work" workshops I pictured myself managing by 1995. 1994 - I converted a spare bedroom in our home into an office, bought my first PC, got hooked into the Internet and quit my job as I had planned nine months earlier. As part of a mini "golden parachute," my former employer, for the next three years, became my core client in the communication counseling side of my new business. 1995 - I realized my weekly columns could become a book for helping people with and without disabilities find freedom when they don't quite fit the mold. After pitching it unsuccessfully to 50 publishers, I finally found a book packager (former high school English teacher) to edit my manuscript and put the book in final form. 1996 - I self-published my book, Break Out, trying to promote it through traditional media and the Internet. I gained a state grant for researching target markets and delivery options for my "ready to work" workshop and my book. 1997 - Based on the state grant research results, I decided to learn basic web site development, facilitation and marketing skills so I could use the stories in my book as a framework for a discussion forum web site called tell-us-your-story.com to help people with disabilities share and showcase their personal-experience stories. 1998 - Discovering the Internet can bring people together into a global workshop, I devoted my energies to building the tell-us-your-story.com community, which generated more than 1,000 personal experience stories and clarified the issues about family, friends and work people with disabilities must address. 1999 - As a consultant, I helped eSight.org develop its first business plan and generate its initial content for eSight. 2000 - I decided to close my consulting business and work full time for the members of eSight Careers Network. I've gone through many failures over the years, but remember the career vision I had in 1993 about helping people with disabilities become "ready to work?" It's becoming a reality for me today through eSight. It's only in a different form and under different circumstances. I was preparing for eSight, but I didn't know at the time. It combines in-person professional development seminars with electronic publishing and telecommuting -- a situation and an opportunity I could never have envisioned nine years ago. Serving the eSight community is the right fit for me (it's my dream job) because the last nine years -- and the last 37 -- have been pointing me in that direction. Go to Top of Page Bookmark this article to: 
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