Disguising Your Age in Executive Resumes

If you’re looking for a position at the executive level, there’s a chance that you’ve been in your career for quite some time. As you know, when competing for work, especially in a strained economy, some employers choose to go with candidates who present a greater promise of longevity – something a seasoned professional may not always bring to the table in their eyes. Of course, you know you’re not planning on walking away from your career anytime soon, but it’s sometimes hard to explain this to employers, which for many means disguising their age until they’re able to get to the interview. If this is something you’d like to try in your resume, here are some tips to consider: Exclude Some Specifics of Your Professional Employment One trick that you can use to disguise your age on your resume is to structure your professional employment so that it doesn’t focus on specific dates. For instance, if you’ve been working for over 20 years, you might summarize some of your early experience at the end of your resume – without dates – rather than including every job you’ve had chronologically. Another option you have is to not mention the early years at all, unless they’re so impressive that you just can’t leave them out. For instance, if you worked in retail at a local department store and your latest job was president of the department store nationally, you might want to include this to show your fast progression throughout your career. However, if you started off in retail at the department store and now you’re a top-level engineer, the connection is truly too weak to consider adding it to your resume, especially if you’re trying to avoid telling your age. Exclude Dates for Your Education Another exclusion you might consider for your resume is your graduation dates. By the time you’ve reached the executive level, the amount of knowledge, training and skills you’ve acquired probably far outweigh the education you received in 1968. New technology has surfaced that wasn’t even thought of back then so there’s no way your schooling could have trained you for everything you know now. Not to discredit what you’ve learned, of course, you just want to keep in mind that much of what you know now is basically from on-the-job training. So while it’s always important to mention the education you’ve acquired, mentioning the date of your graduation would be an unnecessary disclosure of your age. When You Get to Your Interview … So now you’ve been called in for an interview and you’re a little worried about becoming a victim of age bias. But keep in mind that the interview is where you have a chance to shine. You are a strong candidate with tons of experience, so this is the time to showcase your knowledge, commitment to the organization, impressive ROIs and more. Don’t let your age slow you down from getting the job you want. Being older than some of your competition gives you the unfair advantage of wisdom, skills and accomplishments. If you don’t forget this as you write your resume and go to your interview, you should be able to snag a great position in no time.