What if you put MOM on your resume?

Seriously...what would that look like?

Photo by Fredrik Solli Wandem on Unsplash

Parenting is labor.

Parenting is a job.

Parenting is work.

These are things I say all the time. In fact, a lot of people say them, but a lot of people also just provide lip service to the ideas. In this country (and in most of the world) there is very little respect for the labor of parenting and not enough has been done to provide a cultural shift in order to get it that respect.

Too many employers look at a resume with time away from the workplace due to caregiving obligations and dismiss that candidate immediately.

This must change. There should be no stigma against having time away from work on your resume. In fact, it should become the norm to be able to say on a resume why you took that time. You should even bullet-point all of the completely transferable skills you acquired and honed while taking that time.

Caregivers are some of the most resourceful and efficient people out there and those skills should be celebrated instead of castigated in the workplace.

We need to look at life skills as additives. We are overly focused on academic competencies versus the life skills people bring to the table.  

What if we put it on all our resumes….not just if we have taken a pause…….

My dear friend, the author Becky Viera (Author of ENOUGH ABOUT THE BABY). described working part-time while she had her son on her own Linked-In page:

“What was I doing while writing part-time? Being a FULL-TIME mom, which is a job. I work approx. 18 hours a day, 7 days a week with no sick or vacation days. I don't get paid, I'm often unappreciated but I am GOOD at what I do. I can center myself in the eye of a hurricane and/or tantrum and meltdowns. Prepare food like a short-order cook. I catch vomit with my hands, scare away monsters and save small children from danger (imaginary and real). I'm a child chauffeur, snack fetcher and queen of NEVER letting the iPad battery die.”

THIS IS PERFECTION!

These are the kinds of skills we want our workers to have! This is the kind of information that we should be including on resumes and LinkedIn. We should encourage people to offer up all of their skills, not just the ones that receive certificates or degrees. 

So I decided to write my own MOM SECTION of my resume. And this is what I did: