What do Michael Scott, Pam Beesley Halpert, and Dwight Schrute all have in common?
If you said, they work in the same office, you’d be right.
But if you also said, they all held multiple positions at the same company, you’d also be right.
And that’s what this video is about. How do we actually address and include multiple jobs at the same company on our resumes? By the end of this video, you’ll know how.
So when we have multiple jobs at the same company, our main goal is showing progress, development, and growth. It’s the opposite of job hopping.
So in order to show progress, typically the best way to do this is to separate each role you held at the same company, out.
But that doesn’t work for all situations.
Let’s dive into a few specific examples:
Multiple Jobs That Are Promotions
Let’s first look at a situation where we definitely would want to break out the separate jobs we’ve held at the same company. These are multiple jobs that are promotions.
Pam Beesley Halpert had a variety of jobs at Dunder Mifflin. So when she said her resume should fit on a post-it, that was totally off base.
She started as receptionist, left to work with Michael as a sales representative at the Michael Scott Paper Company, returned to Dunder Mifflin in sales, and sort of negotiated, but not really, a promotion to office administrator.
In Pam’s case, because her jobs were all different, and progressive, we will separate them out into each of their own roles, with their own descriptions, and followed up with a selection of her best accomplishments for each role.
First, we’ll start with the employer name and the total duration of working at the company. Now because Pam had a disruption when she went to Michael Scott Paper Company, we need to account for that so we can’t use the whole duration from receptionist to present.
Then underneath that, we’ll break out each of the roles.
In using this approach, this won’t seem like job hopping.
In order to make these moves seem even more intentional and planned, I recommend including a bullet for each role that indicates the reason you moved into a new opportunity that makes sense to your career direction.
For example, say Pam wants to pursue an Operations Manager role, it would make sense for her to include a bullet that mentions why she moved into the role of Office Administrator that will help her make a case for being qualified to become an Operations Manager.
No more post-it resume for Pam!
Multiple Jobs That Are Promotions On Paper Only
Now let’s take a look at Michael’s resume. So Michael’s last job while at Dunder Mifflin was Regional Sales Manager. I find it a bit hard to believe that he went from salesman to the manager of an entire region overnight.
I suspect that he had a role of Sales Manager somewhere in between.
But it is very possible that in going from Sales Manager to Regional Manager, there wasn’t much difference between the two roles. So this situation is multiple jobs that are only promotions on paper.
This can happen a lot.
We get a promotion on paper as a reward for good behaviour, I mean, tenure and contribution. Like going from Account Manager to Senior Account Manager. Or Service Desk Representative to Senior Service Desk Representative.
But even with these promotions, our role can stay largely the same.
If this is the case, it’ll be difficult to extrapolate different duties for each role. So instead, we layer them on top of one another.
This shows progress and shows we were promoted.
But it also makes our lives a heck of a lot easier not forcing ourselves to figure out unique duties for each separate position.
And when we’re thinking of which accomplishments to include in our bullets, we use the absolute best stuff from across the duration of both of the roles that we’ve layered here.
Multiple Jobs That Are Lateral
And let’s look at Dwight’s situation. Dwight loved to make new jobs for himself that HE though were prestigious but no one else did.
As a sales representative, becoming assistant to the regional manager was at best, a lateral role. So that’s what we’ll look at here, dealing with lateral career moves.
We would treat lateral moves just like we’d treat promotions.
The difference is in our explanation for making a lateral move.
We’ve all got good reasons for taking a new lateral role, but we need to make this abundantly clear to the reader, and also use it to support our target direction. In this case, of course, Dwight want to be a boss.
I would make things clear in the description of the role, in the first line. And it might look something like this for Dwight’s ARM role:
Proactively stepped into and developed Assistant to the Regional Manager role in order to develop leadership strengths.
So this advice is purely for those of you trying to figure out writing your resume showcasing multiple jobs at the same company.
If you’re wondering about how to deal with a variety of short-term roles across multiple companies, check out my video about job hopping.
But what applies for both scenarios, whether it’s multiple jobs at the same company, or multiple short-term jobs at different companies, is we want to make sure that our resume showcases growth and development of our skills and strengths as they apply to our target direction.
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