Guest Author: Jessica Holbrook Hernandez is an expert resume writer, career and personal branding strategist, author, and presenter.
Website: http://www.greatresumesfast.com

I recently met a woman who had started a new job with a Fortune 50 company several months ago. While she enjoyed some aspects of her new position, she was having a very difficult time adjusting to the culture of her new company due to the other employees constantly using acronyms she didn’t understand. The situation is so bad that every day she writes down a list of terms that she doesn’t grasp and asks her assistant to explain them.

This is a fairly extreme example of corporate culture gone awry, but it reminded me of something I see often in reviewing resumes. Candidates who have worked for one company or in one industry for a long time often fill their resumes with acronyms and jargon that would only make sense to another employee at their current company. People often don’t even notice that they‘re doing this, as they have been using these terms for years and forget that not everyone knows them.

A related issue is candidates capitalizing terms on their resume because they’re used to seeing them written that way by their current employer. For instance, while your current company may have you complete a Baseline Analysis of Risk report every time a critical incident occurs, your resume will read much more clearly if you simply write, “completed risk analysis of serious incidents”.

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