Combination Resume

About This Resume

With ten or more years of work behind you, the skills a new employer wants are often spread across several jobs. A combination resume pulls them into a short summary at the top, then gives the full, dated work history underneath, so a recruiter sees both the match and the timeline. It suits people moving up a level, shifting into a neighboring field or coming back after a detour. It also holds up well in the screening systems many employers use, because the job entries stay in their usual order.

The two halves have to agree. Recruiters check whether each skill or result at the top is backed up lower down, with a job, a date and a number. A claim that appears only in the summary makes the reader doubt everything around it, especially in a field such as finance or logistics where results are easy to check. Hiring managers then read the most recent job closely and skim the rest.

What to Include

• A headline with the job title you want
• A two- or three-line summary, then four to six core skills or selected results matched to the posting
• A full work history, newest first, with employer, title, location and years
• Three or four bullets for each recent job that back up the skills at the top
• Shorter entries for older or less related jobs
• Education, certifications and tools at the end

Combination Resume Sample

Tips for Your Combination Resume

• Limit the top section to what the posting asks for. Four to six skills or results is plenty, and each one should appear again in a job entry below.
• Back up every claim. If your summary lists carrier negotiation, the job where you did it should say which contracts, when, and what they saved.
• Keep it to two pages. The skills section adds length, so trim older jobs to a line or two each.
• If you are changing fields, put the skills that carry over first and translate them into the new field's words, then let the job entries show where you used them.
• Use standard headings such as Summary, Skills, Experience and Education. Screening software looks for them, and a creative heading can hide a whole section from it.
• Test the page by reading only the top third. If a stranger could not guess the job you want from those lines, rewrite the headline and summary.
• Show promotions inside one company clearly. List each title with its own years under the same employer, so the reader sees the step up without doing the math.