According to a survey by Eagle Hill Consulting, employees spend 50 percent more time on collaborative work than they did 20 years ago. But what does “collaboration” mean, and how can your resume highlight your ability to collaborate?
What Collaboration Means
In collaborative working, two or more people in an organization work together to achieve a business goal or benefit. Usually, the people are at a similar level in the organization, though they may be from different departments or even different companies. A team may be collaborative, or it may not—a collaborative team brings together people with different skill sets to work on a common objective.
According to SmartSheet, only 88 percent of people prefer collaboration over competition. When collaboration is lacking, organizations become “siloed”—different parts of the organization refuse to share information with anyone else—and progress is often impossible as a result.
How to Highlight Collaboration on Your Resume
Because the work environment is so much more complex these days, stretching across borders and industries, companies recognize that collaboration is a necessity. Collaboration affects even the smallest businesses: when a local restaurant joins with other local restaurants to create a soup festival, they are collaborating.
To highlight your collaborative talents on your resume:
- Specify if the teams you are on or lead consist of people with different skills and backgrounds. Remember, a team of individuals just like yourself is not necessarily collaborative; one that contains people with different backgrounds working to a common goal is collaborative.
- Describe times when you reached across teams, departments, companies, or partners. When you reach outside your team or department to accomplish a goal, you are collaborative.
- Share what you accomplished through collaboration. Having relationships with those outside your immediate team or area of expertise is great; even better is building those relationships to benefit your company.
- Explain anything you did to improve collaboration. For example, you attended or set up a leadership course, or you gave people the tools they needed to collaborate better (such as a software program that improved communications).
You may have more collaborative examples and talents than you are aware of because collaboration has become such a common feature in today’s workplace. Let Robin’s Resumes® help you create a resume that shows the value you bring to a collaboration.