Sample Functional Resume: Cerebral Palsy Career Builder for Job Seekers

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Here's a sample functional resume you can give to your job seeker with cerebral palsy (CP) when he or she needs a process for identifying key accomplishments to highlight in a resume.

That sample functional resume (one that highlights work results instead of a chronological work history) happens to be my own – one that is based on my personal definition of success.

This article shows how I took my critical first steps in building the framework for my current resume -- a framework I started developing in 1993.

Before building that framework, I recognized, after some soul searching, that I'm “accomplishment motivated.” In other words, I feel successful when I know I’ve completed a task, and that task was done well.

That understanding helped me identify my most important workplace accomplishments and the key success factors within those accomplishments which would likely drive my future achievements.

“Accomplishments” and “key success factors” were the key elements I used in building my resume – my sample functional resume.

Identifying my “key success factors”

I used the following eight steps to examine my work experience, review my accomplishments and identify my key success factors -- an essential, initial exercise before I developed my resume and charted a path to my next career position.

1. Listed my functional experiences on the job as well as in volunteer positions.
   
   
2. Identified three to five over-arching, key success factors which contributed to the accomplishments I listed as functional experiences in step one.
   
   
3. Defined briefly what these key success factors meant to me in terms of the individual skills and personal qualities I used to build the accomplishments I listed in step one.
   
   
4. Selected three to five individual skills/personal qualities from the list in step three which most closely apply to the accomplishments I listed in step one.
   
   
5. Ranked these five skills/qualities I possess according to how strong they are in me, how useful they've been to me and how enjoyable they've been to me.
   
   
6. Matched my key success factors I identified in step two with the five skills/qualities I ranked in step five according to strength.
   
   
7. Cited two specific examples of functional experience I listed in step one to illustrate those key success factors/skills/ qualities.
   
   
8. Chose the best functional experience example of the two in each case.

Building my resume

Here's how I used my key success factors to build my resume – a sample functional resume that you can recommend as guide for your job seeker:

• I rearranged my key success factors, skills and qualities, putting the most important first, and pruned them from five to four.
  
  
• This list identified me as a resource person for defining direction and managing change within an organization. To me, that could be summed up in two words: “Gaining Alignment.” “Gaining Alignment” became the "hinge" for putting the pieces of my resume together.
  
  
• I now converted my four key success factors, skills and qualities into four key result areas, using action verbs to succinctly describe essential activities involved in each of the functional experience examples I had previously chosen. For each, I then added more concrete results. So I ended up with one page which highlighted my functional experience.
  
  
• This one-page statement of my functional experience became the core of my resume, a 17-by-11 sheet of very light gray cover stock folded in half. It became my second page. The fourth page (or backside) of my one-fold pamphlet (resume) I left bank.
  
  
• The third page included these four sections: Professional Experience, Education, Professional Affiliations, and Other Commitments.
  
  
• I carried the "Gaining Realignment" theme from page two (functional experience) to the front page of my resume by citing a favorite quotation that defined what those two words meant to me.
  
  Here is that quotation:
  
  “When you identify with your company’s purpose,
  when you experience ownership in a shared vision,
  you find yourself doing your life’s work,
  instead of just doing time.”
  
  - John Naisbitt
  Futurist, author

I now see, almost 20 years later, that “Gaining Alignment” still works as my two-word statement of my purpose in life. I’ve been out of the business communications field for two decades, but, as someone who is focused on disability employment issues, I’m now helping job seekers align themselves with the needs of employers -- a different venue but same purpose.

My recommendations

Help your new job seeker identify his or her key success factors, workplace skills and personal qualities and convert them into a one-page statement of concrete results wrapped around functional experience.

Your youngster’s key search words for resume databases will pop out of his or her statement of functional experience.

With those key words as a core, your young job seeker can adapt his or own sample functional resume to a wide variety of uses in an effective job marketing campaign.

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