Your resume, regardless of the baggage associated with it, is probably your most critical career management document. While it's not something you ought to leave lying around on your desk for others to see, that doesn't mean you ought to treat it like something you dust off only when you really need it. It needs to be reviewed quarterly, believe it or not.
So, in this cast we'll teach you how to prepare it, and how to maintain it. We won't talk about cover letters, or how resumes are used in the job search, because job search is only one use of your resume.
Today we're going to talk about preparing your own resume. This is a topic we covered WAY back in 2005, and today we're dusting it off, refreshing it, and re-recording it for our listeners.
Now folks, we are not suggesting that you leave your current company. And if you're thinking that your resume is something that needs to stay off your desk, you're right. There's still the old adage that the resume is a thing to be heard but not seen. You talk about your resume in an interview but you don't actually show it to anybody at your company. That's true. Resumes still have a stigma. If somebody sees your resume on a desk, they're going to assume that you're job hunting. And that's a negative. Even if you have a very enlightened boss, they're going to perceive that as a negative. If nothing else, they're going to be frustrated by it.
The point though is that in the last 40 years companies have turned over the responsibility of managing people's career to the employee. You need a document to capture your career success. And the document that's perfect for that is a resume.
So if you change your thinking to see your resume as a career history, you're going to be fine. And you just need to keep it off your desk. Do it at home, do it after hours when everybody is gone. You must keep your resume current. Fully 70% of the resumes we get have errors in them. The vast majority of the errors are on the most current jobs. This is what happens when someone prepares their resume on short notice.
If you see it as a career maintenance and management tool where you capture things that you would forget two years later (because you can't go back and recreate things two years after the fact) it's a very powerful tool and you have to do it.
We've found that when we needed a resume it was when we least expected to need one. The opportunities of a lifetime are those things where a target of opportunity shows up.  Those are the good jobs, generally. And that's where you're least prepared to do it.
If you don't know how to put it together and then you rush something, it's just not going to look professional. And the really good jobs are going to be interviewed by or are going to be screened by people who really know what a good resume is like. If you want to impress people, you need to have it done in advance.