Executive Resume for Advanced Alumni & Mid-career Professionals

If you’ve been out of school for 8+ years and are looking at a new role or changing fields altogether, having a different resume style than what you started out with may be incredibly helpful in landing your next role. We’ve discovered the “executive resume” which focuses on core competencies as well as experiences to build a stand-out resume that can grab attention and navigate through ATS systems.

Read more about ATS in our tailoring your resume guide.

What’s so great about this resume style?

  • Expanding beyond one page: once you have enough relevant experience, you have the option to expand your resume to two pages. We recommend not going over two pages and, if you only have a little bit of information spilling onto the second page, it’s better to edit and shorten it back down to one.
  • Competencies: Particularly important if you’re changing fields, this resume focuses on key skills and traits you will bring with you to your desired role. Not only does this help you talk about your experience in different ways, it helps you talk broadly about all the required and desired skills from a job description that you can outline to help your resume move through the application process.
  • Readability: This style not only is easy for hiring managers to skim (keep in mind, most reviewers only spend about 6-8 seconds looking at your resume), the simple, single column layout ensures that any ATS system can also read it with ease.
  • Organization: You’ll note that education is now at the bottom of your resume – unless you’re in a current graduate program, there’s no need to keep it at the top, as you have other experiences that are more important to highlight right away. There is also the opportunity to discuss your achievements in bullet points and provide a short description of your role under your job title to go into more depth than on a standard resume.

Check out the editable template below (be sure to make a copy in order to save the Google Docs version) and know that you can edit headings, sections, and information as you need in order to make it fit your and your work.

Executive Resume (Google Doc)

Executive Resume (Word Doc)

Executive Resume (PDF)