"I" in your resume Summary?

Hi Liz,

I was trained to train others not to use "I" in their summary statements (purely
for the purpose of brevity). However, I see in your spruce-up you did just
that. Can you say a bit about your perspective on switching to "I"?

Thanks,

Chris

NOTE FROM LIZ:

Hi Chris!

I like the first person Summary style because it personalizes a resume. I've
always hated the Summary format "A results-oriented professional..." (whatever
the actual words) because it's neither first nor third person exactly - it's a
kind of anonymous subject-less weird military/industrial jargon-y yuckspeak. I'm
fine with the third person, a la "Jane is a research-happy Marketer who..." but
as soon as I write something like that, I think, "Isn't it arch to write about
ourselves in the third person, in general? When, in life, would we ever do
that?"

We typically write about ourselves in the third person in only one place that I
know of, and that's a professional bio, because those are meant for publication.
There's no me-to-you correspondence involved. We read the actors' bios in
Playbill and we don't expect a personal greeting from the actors, but when we're
sending a resume from one person to another, why the formality?

There's a kind of distance that comes from writing about ourselves as though we
aren't speaking to the reader directly, and for me, that distance is
off-putting. A lot of people commented on the third-person thing when Roland
Burris recently joined the Senate, because Burris reportedly speaks about
himself in the third person all the time. If you hear me do that, please knock
me over and kick me.

Compare these two mini-Summaries:

A savvy Marketing Research professional with background in healthcare, finance
and apparel.

I'm a Market Researcher who's fascinated by the study of why people buy and why
they don't.

We can achieve a Summary of whatever length we want with or without "I," so
brevity shouldn't be a factor. Cheers! Liz