How to build your board resume

Your board resume summarizes the skills and expertise you bring to a board. While your career resume highlights the roles and accomplishments you have achieved as a professional, your board resume showcases your unique board value proposition, skills, expertise, industry knowledge, and previous board experience.

Your board resume should be no more than two pages and should include your:

• Board value proposition – Outline the value-add you bring to a board (To learn more, refer to the Savvy Director’s Guide to Your Board Value Proposition).
  
• Skills, expertise, and industry-specific knowledge.
  
• Career accomplishments – Highlight relevant executive and leadership roles to showcase your understanding of the business, the industry, and the broader macro environment.
  
• Speaking engagements and awards – List relevant awards and areas in which you are a sought-after expert or thought leader.
  
• Current and past board experience – Highlight the committees you have served on and the leadership roles you have taken on within each board.

Don’t forget to update your LinkedIn profile with the highlights from your board resume! LinkedIn is often where you will make your first impression in today’s digital age.

In her articles in Careersteering.com and Forbes, board resume expert Rosa E. Vargas recommends the following to optimize your board resume:

• Experience – Describe your unique value as a board candidate and list committee and board experience first.
  
• Reputation – Share your relationship-building, decision-making, and consensus-creation skills, mention key alliances, and outline high-stakes collaborations that resulted from your advisement.
  
• Public image – List speaking engagements, community involvement, and publications.
  
• Brand championing – Speak to your experience driving company vision, shaping corporate identity, managing risk, and protecting/strengthening the company’s brand.
  
• Business transaction bandwidth – Accentuate leadership through transformations, M&As, restructurings, exits, turnarounds, consolidations, and rebranding efforts.
  
• Quantify – Showcase your ability to enhance shareholder value in real terms and share how ROI, EBITDA growth, market share, profit, capital gains, or stock value increased under your leadership.
  
• Soft skills – Describe your leadership style, vision, philosophy, and character.

For more tips and ideas, review Deborah Rosati’s 2-page board resume and one-page board profile or the board resume FAQs on her blog.

by Women Get On Board

Women Get On Board Inc. (WGOB) is a social-purpose company committed to elevating the next generation of women corporate directors. Our mission is to connect, promote and empower women to serve on corporate boards with confidence and courage.

Copy link