The Essential Parts of an SES (Senior Executive Service) Federal Job Resume – How is Yours?

If you’re applying for a position as a senior executive with the federal government, you need a top-notch SES federal resume in order to be interviewed for a senior executive position.

When the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) of 1978 was written, the people who framed it envisioned the Senior Executive Service (SES) as a corps of senior executives with solid executive expertise that valued public service and had a broad perspective of 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 should function well as executives–and executives are paid to oversee technical experts, not to compete with them.

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

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

A profile or career summary is a short statement that highlights your abilities in a manner that makes it easy for anyone reading it to speedily pick up on them. Because a single job posting may easily draw thousands of applicants, your profile has to stand out from the herd to get noticed. Your profile should be a short professional biography in no more than 10 lines.

For example, a good profile statement might read, “Master of Business Administration with substantial operations management experience. Demonstrated capability for supplying the highest level of corporate services while significantly reducing costs. Fully conversant with all facets of purchasing, security, managing staff, planning facilities and cost accounting. Trilingual English, Spanish and Italian. Reduced overhead by 25% by instituting new competitive bidding procedure that improved quality of service.”

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

For example:

o Designed and wrote new guidelines, policies, flow charts and employee handbooks that increased productivity and saved $40,000 annually

o Received award for improving employee performance by 25%

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

o Reduced the number of grievances filed by workers by 60% by obtaining their input for and involving them in management decisions

Whatever your SES career objective, what matters most is concise, perfectly crafted SES federal resume copy that meets the criteria of the post for which you are applying in a fashion superior to those of your competitors for the job.

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