Retail Manager looking for new career field!

[divinejayku]

Thirty-three year old husband and father of a nine month old. Recently resigned as a retail manager. Stumbled across this forum looking for advice. I'll post an attachment of my resume with the personal data containing 'xx'. Any feedback is welcome. Thanks!

[Gone_Hiking]

Would you share why you resigned?  Burn-out? Other reasons?  Are you looking to manage people or becoming individual contributor?

[2Cent]

Maybe add what kind of thing you would like to do. Your resume highlights you as a retail manager. If you want a change you could try hospitality or sales. But there are probably many more things you could do if you really wanted to.

[divinejayku]

Thanks for the feedback. Main concern was my schedule was all over the place. Working every weekend, 70+ hours per week, time away from my baby was killing me emotionally. Looking at management trainee programs for business to business. Distribution centers, warehouses. Inventory management and human resources I am both quite strong with. Enjoy data analysis and problem solving to improve numbers. Not really looking for a direct sales career, but involvement on the other side of inventory control.

[dhc]

A couple of feedback points on the resume itself:

• "Exceeds expectation" doesn't sound like an award, especially if you (apparently) haven't didn't get them in earlier years. If I were a hiring manager and that didn't make me throw out the resume, you could expect questions about why it took 5 years for you to start exceeding expectations and why I shouldn't expect the same to be true with me.
• The vast majority of what's listed sounds like just fulfilling a boring job description. You should be highlighting more things like "improved inventory accuracy" and less things like "processed payroll on a weekly basis" (doesn't sound like your goal is to land a job in payroll processing)
• "Operation of 3+ monitors running multiple programs and windows" - how in the world is this a thing worth bragging about?

I'm in a different industry, but I've had a lot of success using a "human-voiced resume": https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2014/07/17/how-to-write-your-human-voiced-resume/#34a53a276edd. The idea is that everyone has a job description and almost everyone does the things in it unless they were fired; what makes you stand out is the things that have changed for the better where you've worked because of you. If data analysis to improve things is what gets you excited, find a way to highlight a few specifics where you made a positive impact that way, and it's likely to apply across a variety of industries.

[MrMonkeyMoustache]

Well, what field are you looking at? You said the non-sales end of inventory. So, are you talking like operations management? I hear people really hate the Six Sigma guys.

[divinejayku]

Thanks again for the input. Operations Management is definitely something I could get into. Looking at management trainee programs where I can utilize my learned set of skills and have at least a semi-decent work schedule compared to what retail has to offer. A training program would allow me to learn and for the company to see where I am best suited as well. Some of the programs I have looked into have a several month competitive session where each trainee goes into several different departments to grow and learn and allow the company to find the best fit for them. Obviously, this would work very well for me but I don't see many of them. Any suggestions here? The reason I put the stuff like payroll into my master resume is because I didn't want to leave out anything that may be considered beneficial to a potential employer. I do appreciate the criticism a great deal and am implementing it into tweaking my master resume. Any further suggestions are very welcome. I will re-post my master resume after some changes. Thank you!