Planning for the day after the world doesn’t end

Are you worried about your agency? Your retirement? Your job? Welcome to the club. It’s a large and growing club thanks to the mostly bad or confusing news coming out of Washington. While the swamp hasn’t been touched much, many believe the upcoming reorganization and “reforms” could cost them their jobs. Feds who dodged the shutdown bullet last week now face the possibility of furloughs further down the road and maybe reductions-in-force. While there fisn’t

Feds who dodged the shutdown bullet last week now face the possibility of furloughs further down the road and maybe reductions-in-force. While there isn’t much individuals can do about their on-the-job fate, there is something anyone can do that’s easy, can be done quickly and it is oh-so-simple. And necessary. To be done before you lose or take a job or decide to jump ship: Update your federal résumé.

Have you put off checking your aging résumé until you have an idea as to what Congress and the White House may/will/can do about “reforming” the civil service and trimming a dozen agencies of duties — and employees? If so, when will that be? Short answer: nobody knows. Like delaying doing your taxes, the résumé situation doesn’t get better with age. Do it as a move to position yourself for a promotion in 2017, regardless of what is or isn’t happening around you.

Enter federal résumé guru Kathryn Troutman. She’s author of the Federal Resume Guidebook and she says nobody should wait until things get better, or worse, to fine tune their federal résumé. Troutman is a long-time coach who has walked thousands of feds through the pesky-to-necessary minefield of the résumé. She says that “no matter what happens with agency reshaping or budget cutbacks, it’s a dog-eat-dog federal job world out there. Beat the crowd and get your TARGETED federal résumé out there!!”

So what’s a targeted résumé and how do you “get it out there?” Listen to today’s Your Turn radio show at 10 a.m. EDT right here on Federal News Radio. We’ll be talking with Kathryn Troutman, the designer of the FIRST Federal Resume in 1996, president of The Resume Place, Inc. and creator of the Ten Steps to a Federal Job^®  curriculum. Kathryn will give you top tips for your federal résumé and career strategies for the unknown world of a smaller government. She’s a career federal coach who knows how to give résumé-shy feds the confidence to keep their career moving ahead and she’ll talk about strategic thinking which may land you a promotion this year.

If you have a question for Kathryn, send them to me before showtime at mcausey@federalnewsradio.com. You can listen at Federal News Radio  or in the D.C. metro area on 1500 AM. The show will be archived on the Your Turn webpage, so you can listen later if that works for you.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Michael O’Connell

Leonardo DiVinci is credited with writing the first résumé in the form of a letter to potential employer Ludovico Sforza.

Source: Wikipedia

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.