Dear Sam: I have been trying to update my own resume for months and I cannot seem to make progress. Every time I sit down to work on it, I end up second-guessing myself, rewriting sections repeatedly, or wondering whether I am emphasizing the right things. Why is it so difficult to write about my own experience? — Mark
Dear Mark: What you are describing is actually very common, and it is one of the primary reasons so many professionals struggle to update their resumes on their own.
Most people assume that because they know their careers better than anyone else, they should also be the most qualified person to write about them. In reality, the opposite is often true.
One of the biggest challenges is that you are simply too close to your own experience. You know every project, every responsibility, every promotion, every challenge, and every accomplishment. Because you have lived it every day, much of it feels normal to you.
What feels routine to you, however, may be highly impressive to someone evaluating your background for the first time.
I cannot tell you how many times I have been speaking with a client and they casually mention an accomplishment that they consider unremarkable, only for me to stop the conversation and ask several follow-up questions because it is clearly one of the strongest aspects of their background.
Another challenge is that professionals often evaluate their experience from the perspective of someone who already understands it. Employers do not have that advantage. They are encountering your background for the first time and trying to make sense of it quickly. What seems obvious to you may not be obvious to them at all.
There is also a tendency to focus on what was required rather than what was achieved. Because you know how much work went into a project, you may spend considerable space explaining the process while overlooking the outcome. Employers, however, are often more interested in the result than the effort required to get there.
Perhaps most importantly, writing your own resume requires a level of objectivity that is difficult to achieve when discussing yourself. It is challenging to determine which accomplishments deserve the most attention, which experiences should be emphasized, and which details are less important when you have personal knowledge attached to all of them.
That is why so many professionals find themselves staring at the same document for weeks or months without making meaningful progress. The issue is rarely a lack of experience. More often, it is a lack of distance from that experience.
Sometimes the greatest value in the process comes from having someone help you see your own background through the eyes of someone encountering it for the first time.
