If I pivoted my career, how many years of experience should I say I have?
Professional experience vs relevant experience, some general heuristics, and where to put the unrelated experience in your resume.
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Q: If I pivoted my career into a new field, how many years of experience should I say I have in my professional summary? Should I include all my experience or just the experience relevant to the role I’m applying for?
A: Unless you’ve been on the same career path your whole career, claiming years of experience (YOE) on your resume can be nuanced. You want the first thing someone to see on your resume to align with your goals in your job search, and you want it to make sense to them. Having 20 years of experience but applying to entry level roles can be very confusing. So can having 2 years of experience and applying for staff level roles. But these situations happen all the time.
Because individual situations vary wildly, my advice is hard to bucket into hard+fast rules. Instead, I devised some general rules of thumb for positioning your years of experience on your resume.
(1) Everyone: you generally want to describe your full body of experience on your resume. If your career path hasn’t been linear, ie it doesn’t look like PM → Sr. PM → Staff PM or Group PM, there are patterned ways to describe your YOE to get credit for all the wisdom while looking like the right fit for the level of roles you’re targeting.
(2) Pivoters: if you’ve switched roles, industries, or career paths altogether, there are multiple ways to claim your professional experience without being misleading about your years of experience (YOE) in your current career path.
(3) Experienced pivoters: if you’re 12+ years into your career and have made a major career pivot but worry about ageism or concerns over your career momentum (due to the pivot), you should focus your resume on the path you are on today. You can append an Additional Experiences section to your resume to clarify your total YOE.
Keep reading for more detailed guidelines and text examples you can grab + reuse ↓