Complete Guide to Writing a Professional Summary to Stand Out and Get Noticed

 

A professional summary is NOT a professional objective. An objective is a statement of 2 to 3 lines which informs the reader of your career goals, the skills you want to develop and where you might see yourself on a professional level a few years down the road. Essentially, a resume objective, sometimes called a career objective, is all about you. But the thing is that, unless you have close to zero years of work experience, an employer just does not care about your career goals. Employers are self-centered, just like the rest of us. They care and are interested in their needs, their revenues and their objectives. Not yours. They are interested in how you will help them reach their objectives and fulfill their needs.

A better alternative to a resume objective is a professional summary, which should appear at the top of your resume. A professional summary is an account of the main aspects of your professional qualifications that explain why you would be a good fit for the role you are interested in. It needs to highlight your top skills, talents and expertise that are relevant for the position you are considering applying to. It can also include your education and achievements that are relevant to the position. It should therefore always (yes, always) be tailored specifically for the job you covet, at least if you want to put the odds in your favor.

However, note that the bulk of your professional summary will probably be the same from one resume to another. Once you have a good solid base for your professional summary, you will probably just need to tweak a few words here and there and maybe add or replace a skill every now and then to adapt and tailor to a specific position.

An important element to remember is that the top part of your resume sets the tone. An HR employee who receives your resume will probably spend only a few seconds to scan through it, beginning with the very top of the page. Their main goal at this point is to eliminate resumes from their pile, until they only have a few. Therefore, if you don’t want to end up in the recycling bin, you need to show the employer your worth in relation to the job you are applying for right up front. That is mainly the goal of a professional summary: to not get tossed aside. An important note: this section of your resume is the most influential one, so you can’t afford to do anything but a stellar job on it.

Naming that section of your resume

Directly below the header (learn how to put together an HR-friendly efficient resume header) of your resume is where your professional summary should appear. Most people will just name this section of their resume “Professional Summary”, “Professional Statement” or “Professional Qualifications”. However, consider naming it differently. Better–and less boring–terms for qualifications would be Competencies, Proficiencies or Expertise. These 3 words communicate that you are not only qualified, but competent, proficient or an expert in what you do. These words deliver a bit more punch than just qualifications and definitely more than professional summary, which sounds very neutral.

Obviously, if you only have a few years of work experience under your belt, don’t over do it by stating your Expertise or your Proficiencies. Stick with something more credible for your level of experience. You won’t fool anyone by qualifying yourself as Experienced or Proficient in XYZ when you are entry-level and only have 2 or 3 years of experience. Adapt the language to your level of experience and ensure you remain credible, as this approach will be a better pay off.

Your resume summary will allow you to put forth your strongest assets in addition to capture important keywords that will resonate with the employer and their applicant tracking system. However, be careful not to cramp your resume with buzzwords, as these days computer programs are able to detect this approach, and you will just end up digging your own grave. Include important relevant words, but don’t exaggerate.

The magic is in the bullet points

In most cases, you will notice on various resume building and career sites recommendations regarding professional summaries that advise to write this section as a statement contained in a 3 to 5 lines paragraph. This is standard. But there is a better – and easier – way to do this.

Instead of writing your summary as a statement, write bullet points. Compared to a paragraph, bullet points brief sentences are easier and faster to read. They often convey ideas more clearly. They communicate information more effectively. They are more reader friendly. People just don’t have time, nor want to read long sentences these days. They get bored and impatient very quickly. They have other things to do, they have places to go. They just don’t have time. It’s almost as if we’ve all suddenly found ourselves with an attention deficit disorder.

Brief sentences organized in a bullet points form will more likely entice the HR employee to read on than when faced with a standard boring paragraph. We tend to perceive bullets points as less of an effort and less time consuming than a paragraph.

Another trick is to use, sparingly, bold characters for keywords that you will want to make pop out of the page. You’ll want to use bold characters in a way that if the reader only reads the words in bold characters, they would still get the essential of your message. This allows the HR employee to really – and efficiently – scan your resume (or at least the top part of it) within a few seconds, and still get what you are about and what you bring to the table.

Now, what exactly does a professional summary–one that will get the job done and get you noticed for the right reasons–looks like? How do you actually write one?

The 2 important elements: the job and you

The first thing before starting to write is that you need to thoroughly understand 2 elements: the job you are interested in, and you. This may sound stupid, but please read on… Once you have mastered an understanding of these 2 elements, you can link them. The goal here with a professional summary is to show a potential employer how your skills and your experience will get the job done. You have to align your professional career with the job, and you cannot do that unless you have a proper understanding of both.

To fully understand the job, especially if this is a job that you have not ever done before, you’ll need to do a bit more than just spend less than one minute reading the job posting. This job could be or will likely be a position that would be close to or related to a position you have held previously or currently, but the bottom line is, you must have a full comprehension and in detail of what the job entails. In order to do this, you can learn a simple but effective method on how to analyze and understand job descriptions easily and quickly. Once you have that covered, you can move to understanding yourself.

You need to fully understand your experience, your skills, your strengths, your competencies, your expertise, etc.… what makes you who you are, and what makes you different from everybody else. More specifically, different from everybody else who will be applying for this position that you are interested in.

You need to conduct an inventory of your skills. Wikipedia defines skill as “the learned ability to perform an action with determined results with good execution often within a given amount of time, energy, or both”. So what can you do well? What are you good at? What things come to you naturally, like you have an intrinsic knowing of?

Even if you don’t have a lot of–or even any–work experience, you still have skills. Everybody has skills. Perhaps these skills need to be refined, and honed and sharpened, but you still have them now. So what are they? How do you figure that out?

One way would be to look into the bestselling job-hunting book “What color is your parachute?”. This book has been a bestseller for a reason. It can help someone to a great extend to figure out what they enjoy doing and what they should consider doing as a job. You may want to consider getting this book eventually, and if so, consider getting an older version–which will be much cheaper, especially if used–of the book as they come out with a new version every year with only a few minor updates. In the book, you’ll find a chapter to guide you in figuring out your skills; but it is focused on helping people in the context of finding work one will enjoy, and not on writing a professional summary, which is what we are trying to do now.

So for the time being, let’s try to figure out your skills in a manner that does not involve reading a book and aimed at writing a professional summary for your resume.

Your personal stories

Think about situations in your life where you were enjoying yourself while accomplishing something, whether professionally or not. So yes, hobbies are included here. These stories should be about situations that made you feel proud of yourself; stories that when you think about them make you smile.

These stories should cover a short period of your life–such as a few weeks–and should involve a goal, task or objective you had, an obstacle or problem that was in the way, how you overcame that hurdle, and the outcome or end results. This could be how you got your very first job, about a competitive sport competition you participated in, about a volunteer work experience you had, about when you started a new hobby that took you completely out of your comfort zone or even about helping out a friend or family member in some way.

Think thoroughly about a few–ideally 5 to 7–of these life experiences. Preferably, you should take some notes for each, splitting your stories into 4 parts of about 1 to 3 lines each:

• The objective you were aiming for;
• The obstacle you had to face;
• The actions you took to move towards achieving your objective; and
• The results of your actions.

For each of these stories, you accomplished something, and to do so, you used some abilities and skills. That is what you need to pull out from these personal life situations and how you will identify your skills.

You may think here that you don’t know how to write, or maybe you just simply don’t feel like it. Suit yourself, but know this: 1. These stories will come quite handy for answering questions during interviews (hint: this is a great way to prepare yourself for interviews, so it’s killing two birds with one stone!); and 2. Writing (just view this as taking some notes) allows your brain to record and register the information more precisely, with the proper words, so when it is time to talk about these stories that will showcase your skills during interviews, you will be prepared and it should come easily.

Skills related to People, Information and Things

Let’s now organize skills into three categories: your skills related to people, your skills related to information and data, and your skills related to things. For each story or life situation you thought about, you will now need to go through the following list of verbs taken from the book “What color is your parachute?” and see which can apply to each of your stories. You can also refer to this list of top action verbs to use in a resume. This will allow you to start putting words on your actual skills.

Skills with people

Initiate, lead, pioneer, supervise, manage, follow through, get things done, motivate, persuade, sell, recruit, consult, advise, coordinate, negotiate, resolve conflicts, help people link up or connect, heal, cure, assess, evaluate, treat, convey warmth and empathy, interview, draw out, raise people’s self-esteem, instruct, teach, tutor, train, coach, speak, listen, counsel, guide, mentor, communicate well in person, communicate well in writing, divert, amuse, entertain, perform, act, interpret, speak or read a foreign language, serve, care for, follow instructions faithfully.

Skills with information

Use intuition, create, innovate, invent, design, use artistic abilities, be original, visualize (including in 3 dimensions), imagine, synthetize, combine parts into a whole, prioritize, organize, classify, perceive patterns, analyze, break down into parts, work with numbers, compute, remember people or data to unusual degree, develop, improve, solve problems, plan, program, research, examine, inspect, compare, see similarities and differences, use acute senses (hearing, smell, taste, sight), study, observe, compile, keep records, file, retrieve, copy.

Skills with things

Control, expedite things, make, produce, manufacture, repair, finish, restore, preserve, construct, shape, model, sculpt, cut, carve, chisel, set up, assemble, handle, tend, feed, operate, drive, manipulate, use my body (hand, fingers) with unusual dexterity or strength.

To each part of each of your stories, add additional notes on your skills based on the previous lists of verbs, categorizing these verbs to people, information or things. You should start noticing patterns emerging. There will be skills in your notes that should come up repeatedly. From these skills that you have used numerous times, start focusing on the ones that you enjoy most and that are linked to the job position you want. Try to pull out a total of approximately 10 to 12 skills from your stories.

At this point, your skills list should essentially be a list of verbs, but you probably already have some ideas of words that may be attached to these verbs from your stories. Next to each of these 10 to 12 verbs, you’ll need to start to add some “what”, and later on you’ll need to specify a “how”.

What and How

The “what” is fairly standard and should come easily (even though on occasions it might not be as simple as it sounds–hence the three examples below), as this is actually directly related to the 3 skills categories: people, information and things.

The “how” is about you and is what makes you different from others. It is about your personality traits. You can refer to this list of 160 adjectives and personality traits to use to describe yourself through your skills, essentially to describe how you get things done.

Here are three examples for each category.

1. verb coordinate from the skills with people: Start by asking yourself: “What did I coordinate exactly in my story? And how did I do that?” So the result could be something along the lines of: “Coordinate a team effectively”.
2. verb organize from the skills with information: Start by asking yourself “What did I organize exactly in my story? And how did I do that?” So the result could be something along the lines of: “Organize client accounts accurately”.
3. verb operate from the skills with things: Start by asking yourself “What did I operate exactly in my story? And how did I do that?” So the result could be something along the lines of: “Operate the cash register diligently”.

So you now have three examples of a verb, a “what” as well as a “how”. Time to add some beef to these skills... because yes! The examples above are skills.

The 5 W Questions: Who, What, When, Where and Why

Let’s use the first skill as an example: “Coordinate a team effectively”. Now let’s elaborate on the “what” in greater detail. In this case the “what” is the team, but it could have been customers, clients, patients, patrons, members, etc.

Ask yourself basic Who, What, When, Where, Why questions (note that not all of these will work and be appropriate every time) about the “what” and try to dig as much as possible, and try to add some adjectives along the way.

• Who is part of the team? How many people? Maybe these people have very different backgrounds (multicultural) and even conflicting personalities and while coordinating the team you had to accommodate all these individuals, which was highly challenging? Maybe you had to put out fires regularly? Were some part timers and other full timers? Perhaps you also onboarded/welcomed new employees within the team?
• What does this team do? Are we talking about a multidisciplinary team (people to have different jobs or tasks or expertise and who are part of the same team)? What is the main goal of this team? What did each person do and how did that impact your task?
• When does this team work? Do they all have the same schedule? Are there challenges related to time or schedules?
• Where does this team work? Is this a team that works remotely? Perhaps from different jurisdictions or cities? Perhaps they are spread around in different locations within the same office or work space?

Here is what we now could have as a skill: “Coordinate effectively a multidisciplinary team of 5 employees from various departments.”

Since this skill (coordinate a team effectively) should be a pattern that you pulled out of your different stories, you should have coordinated a team on more than one occasion. So you need to adapt the language to reflect your broader experience.

“Coordinated effectively multiple multidisciplinary teams of up to 5 employees– both part-time and full-time–from various departments.”

From this one skill, now emerges other additional skills. As an example, taken from the 5W questions above:

“Helped with the onboarding of new employees on the team, facilitating relationships with existing team members and making them feel welcomed and part of the team.”

 

Let’s give it another shot with the second example from the skills with information category: “Organize client accounts accurately”.

Again, ask yourself basic Who, What, When, Where, Why questions about the “what” and try to dig as much as possible, and try to add some adjectives along the way. In this case the “what” would be client accounts.

• Who did you organize client accounts for? Who were the clients? How many accounts were there?
• What were the criteria for organizing the client accounts? In what fashion did you organize the client accounts? What was the particularities or challenges related to this task? Were there sub-accounts or related parent accounts to take into consideration for the organization? Did you set up or revamped the whole filing system for client accounts?
• When was this due? Was there a specific time frame to respect?
• Where were these client accounts? As computer files? If so, what computer program was used? As paper files, perhaps located in an archive or in numerous unidentified filing boxes?
• Why did you have to organize the client accounts? 

Here is what we now could have as a skill: “Organize more than 300 client accounts accurately for the company according to new filing criteria using a new Customer Relationship Management program.”

Since this skill (organize client accounts accurately) should be a pattern that you pulled out of your different stories, you should have organized information or data on more than one occasion. So you need to adapt the language to reflect your broader experience.

“Organized accurately numerous types of client and business information, including client accounts, using various computer software.”

 

Now these sound more like accomplishments that should be included under your various jobs in your resume. If you have a hard time writing descriptions (which should not be actual job descriptions in terms of tasks performed but more as things you accomplished during your tenure in the said position) for the jobs you have held in your resume, this is definitely a method you can use. All you would have to do is come up with stories or situations in the same manner, but directly related to the job position you had, and then apply more or less the same method.

Reframing your qualifications and competencies

To finalize your skills so that they are qualifications or competencies section worthy, you now need to simply tweak and refine each of your 10 to 12 skills in 2 ways.

First, your skills need to match the position you are applying for (learn how to customize your resume by understanding and analyzing job postings easily and quickly), otherwise, your resume will get tossed aside. So make sure you select skills that are relevant for the job.

Second, they need to be adapted so they can be ‘presented as’ qualifications or competencies in your resume. Let’s go back to our first example:

“Coordinated effectively multiple multidisciplinary teams of up to 5 employees– both part-time and full-time–from various departments.”

To rephrase your skill, ask yourself: What am I good at? And answer: I am good at… and then complete the sentence. The result should be something similar to the following:

“Effective coordination of multidisciplinary teams composed of individuals from various departments.”

Now with our second example: “Organized accurately numerous types of client and business information, including client accounts, using various computer software.”

Again, ask yourself: What am I good at? And answer: I am good at… and then complete the sentence. The result should be something similar to the following:

“Accurate organization of various types of client and business information using computer software X, Y and Z.”

 

At the top of your qualifications or competencies list you should add a general overview of your experience, which may take this form:

“4+ years of experience in administration and coordination within small and medium sized businesses.”

So here we have the years of experience, the domain of the experience (administration and coordination), and an environment or industry (small and medium sized businesses). 

Summary

In the end, the professional summary section could look like the following:

COMPETENCIES

• 4+ years of experience in administration and coordination within small and medium sized businesses.
• Effective coordination of multidisciplinary teams composed of individuals from various departments.
• Accurate organization of various types of client and business information using computer software X, Y and Z.
• …

Ideally, you should have between 10 to 12 bullet points that describe your abilities to get things done in a manner that is related to the job you are interested in.

Your professional summary should be tweaked and adapted to each job you apply to, but your first pass at writing this summary should prove to be worthwhile as you should be able to reuse most of it for every position you apply, that is if the jobs are similar to one another.