are we still not supposed to use “I” or “my” on a resume?

A reader writes:

I’m helping my husband update his resume (and starting to look at mine again) and realized it would be so much easier if we could use the first person “I” or “my” to write out bullet points. But we were both taught that using “I” and “my” in resumes was a bad thing. Is that still true? And if so, why?

Yes, this is a weird convention, and it’s still true.

The general rule for resumes is that you use the implied first person — meaning that instead of writing “I created the nation’s first 100-foot rice sculpture,” you write “created the nation’s first 100-foot rice sculpture.” The “I” is implied.

Why is this the case? It most likely came to be the convention because we want resumes to be easily and quickly skimmed; you’re not writing entire narratives or full sentences, just punchy bullet points.

Plus it’s already understood that the entire resume is about you.

That doesn’t mean there’s never an exception where using “I” is the stronger choice, but for 99% of resumes it won’t be.

There’s a little more room to occasionally room to use “my,” but only if it otherwise won’t be clear what you mean. For example, you could have a bullet point like:

* Expanded my client portfolio from 10 to 32 accounts.

If you just wrote “expanded client portfolio from 10 to 32 accounts,” it would sound like you were talking about the company’s portfolio, not specifically your own.

But that’s an exception. The vast majority of the time, it will be perfectly clear what you mean without a “my” — “led department” rather than “led my department,” “published dissertation” rather than “published my dissertation,” and so forth.