The Essential Parts of a Federal Job Resume SES (Senior Executive Service) – How’s Yours?

If you are applying for a senior executive position with the federal government, you need a top-tier federal SES resume to interview for a senior executive position.

When the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) of 1978 was drafted, the drafters envisioned the Senior Executive Service (SES) as a body of senior executives with strong executive experience who valued public service and had a broad perspective. of the government. They intended the SES to be a body of executives, not a group of technical experts. The point is that successful candidates for SES jobs must function well as executives, and executives are paid to supervise technical experts, not compete with them.

Leaving aside for the moment the Executive Core Qualifications (ECQs) which define the competencies required to enter the Senior Executive Service and are used by many departments and agencies in recruitment, performance management and leadership development. For managerial and executive positions, let’s focus on the two most important parts of a federal SES resume:

Your profile (also called career summary) and your achievements.

A profile or career summary is a short statement that highlights your skills in a way that makes it easy for anyone who reads it to quickly pick up on them. Since a single job posting can easily attract thousands of applicants, your profile needs to stand out from the crowd to get noticed. Your profile should be a short professional biography of no more than 10 lines.

For example, a good profile statement might read: “Master of Business Administration with substantial operations management experience. Demonstrated ability to deliver the highest level of corporate services while significantly reducing costs. Fully versed in all facets purchasing, security, personnel administration, planning”. facilities and cost accounting. Trilingual English, Spanish and Italian. Reduced overhead by 25% by instituting a new tender procedure that improved the quality of service.”

The achievement portion of a federal SES resume should list your achievements in a short, easy-to-understand format that avoids generalizations and uses numbers to describe the results of your actions.

For example:

o Designed and wrote new employee guidelines, policies, flowcharts and manuals that increased productivity and saved $40,000 a year

o Received an award for improving employee performance by 25%

o Coordinated continuing education conference that enhanced management’s ability to interact positively with workers

o Reduced the number of complaints filed by workers by 60% by getting their input and involving them in management decisions

Whatever your career goal at SES, what matters most is a concise and perfectly crafted SES federal resume that meets the criteria of the position you’re applying for above your competitors for the job.

This level of resume writing is best left in the hands of professional resume specialists who can take your information and package in a winning way.