Resumes are so much fun. Not. There are 453 tidbits that can cause your resume to get thrown into the junk pile -- and half of them conflict with each other. What we are forced to do, then, is to ensure that the big themes are covered and done in a way that promotes your best work and maximizes the chances of being considered for a position. One way to do that is with the Career Summary. This is a one to three paragraph synopsis of your career. It is not an "Objective" or "Career Objective" statement. The career summary is designed to answer one big question: What makes you a good fit for this job opportunity?

It's a Story

People remember stories and not corporate speak. Take your one to three paragraphs and focus on the value you've brought to employers throughout your career. Then take that value and work it into a story about how your career has helped them. This is not as easy as it looks. I just rewrote my resume, have a career summary, and it is still too corporate speak. It is not exciting and, at least in my opinion, doesn't incent the reader to look further down. In other words, it needs more work. But the objective remains: Create a compelling, short narrative that demonstrates my value.

You Want to Be a Person

The rest of the resume is all about your job skills, accomplishments and results. Very academic, very bland. Seriously, whoever thought "Delivered 42 projects on time and under budget resulting in a 4.2 customer satisfaction rating" is thrilling literature? No one. Consequently, the career summary is a great opportunity to help the reader understand the person you are and the value you bring. Write the summary in a way that personifies all that -- and your point of view.

You'll Need to Rewrite This Several Times

To be different from all the others out there, your career summary will take a couple of iterations to write. Or more. After all, we don't think of ourselves as a story to be told, and we certainly don't think resumes should necessarily come across as personable. Instead, they usually seem like job skill automatons, working hard to produce dry results to an unnamed entity. We don't have a lot of practice writing about who we are, the theme of our career and how it came about. But that is what career summaries need to do. And it will take you more than once to write it well. Career summaries can differentiate you from the crowd. Once you get past the resume reading machines and into the hands of a recruiter, it can help make you a personable job candidate, which separates you from the rest of the pack. Get that first sentence down and the rest will be easier. Like I said, I need to change mine. Perhaps I'll start with "It didn't take long to realize that I can turn chaos into structure. What took a long time was learning that chaos needs creativity to create a lasting structure...."