Category: General Career Advice

Update your resume at least once a year whether you are looking for a new job or not.

Reviewing and updating your resume yearly gives you the opportunity to strip out past successes and add your most recent accomplishments while the details (i.e. numbers) and results are still fresh in your mind.

Even more importantly, it gives you the opportunity to evaluate and assess your progress in meeting your career goals and will help keep you focused and on target.

One last to reason do so is, as Jo Lynne Lockley of Chefs Professional Agency points out:

Sometimes fate smiles only for a second, and you will need to respond. For some reason this window always happens when you are in the middle of an 80 hour week. Having a good resume on file makes it possible for you to send your information without slogging through text your mind is too tired to take in. Anytime there is a change in your job status, do your resume changes within a week.

One of the biggest mistakes a person can make in their career is to become a job hopper – or be viewed as one.

If you jump ship every 6, 12, 18, or ??? months to get that next promotion or get more money, you will eventually find yourself in the position of not getting interviewed by those hotels or restaurants that you really want to work for because they’ll never recoup there investment in you. (Studies have shown that the average restaurant group spends $15,000-$25,000 in recruiting and training expenses per manager hired.)

Instead, you’ll only be considered by those companies that have a “turn and burn” mentality and are only using you until the next manager or chef comes along. (Hmmm.. Kind of similar to what you did with all those jobs and companies you worked at previously.)

Now, at least once in our careers, most of us will experience the realization that we have made the wrong choice in going to work for a particular restaurant or hotel property and leave after a short period time. That’s fine. The important thing is that this is not a pattern or recurring situation. Your career and your resume should not reflect a series of short term positions unless there are extremely good reasons for having done so.

If you think that you might be considered a job hopper, sit down one day and take a good look at your resume and yourself.

If you find that most of your positions have been less than 2 years, then you need to do some serious career planning and/or soul searching. You need to figure out what it is you really want out of your career and what it is going to take to get you to where you want to be while demonstrating commitment to yourself, your career, and the hotel or restaurant companies that you work for.