The Resume Problem: Why My Students Can’t See Their Own Skills

I sit across from a student with a resume that says three years as a server at Applebee’s, and when I ask about what that actually means, they say, well, I took orders and brought people food, and I think about what I’m actually seeing. Three years means you didn’t quit after the first month when you realized it was harder than you thought. It means you showed up consistently for a job with no security, no guaranteed hours, no promise of advancement. It means you learned to manage expectations from impatient people who’d already decided they didn’t like their meal before you brought it out. It means you coordinated with a kitchen that’s moving at full speed while you’re trying to keep eight different tables feeling attended to. It means you memorized specifications. You upsold effectively. You managed pressure without management intervention.

When I tell a student, “You don’t know you have a skill until someone outside of it tells you what they see,” they look at me like I’m speaking a language they don’t understand. Because from the inside, from the perspective of someone who’s lived inside the skill for three years, it doesn’t look like a skill. It looks like what you were supposed to do. It looks like your job. You clock in, you take orders, you bring food, you collect money, and at the end of your shift you go home. That’s not a skill. That’s just what you do.

But I’m sitting on the outside of that job, and I’m seeing coordination and customer service under pressure and the ability to read people and adapt your approach based on what they need. I’m seeing someone who figured out how to manage expectations, how to recover when things went wrong, how to maintain quality when everything is moving too fast. Those are executive-level skills. Those are the skills that management tracks on performance reviews. Those are the skills that people pay thousands of dollars to learn in business school. But you don’t know you have them because you didn’t learn them in business school. You learned them at Applebee’s while worrying about whether your tips would cover gas money.

Military students are the worst at this. They come in with resumes that read like a duty roster: led maintenance team, managed logistics, coordinated operations. And they genuinely cannot see that what they’re describing is leadership, is systems thinking, is the ability to make consequential decisions with incomplete information and live with the results. They just see, I did my job. I did what I was supposed to do. Their entire training system has been built around making them understand that following orders is how you contribute, and now they’re supposed to understand that what they actually did was far more complex than that. I just did what I was supposed to do is their version of I took orders and brought food, which is another way of saying I coordinated multiple simultaneous constraints while managing human expectations and limited resources.

One student thought her only real work experience was babysitting. That’s how she described it on her resume, like it was barely worth mentioning, like any warm body could do it. So I asked her to describe a typical day. She told me about managing three children with different needs and schedules, about conflict resolution when the kids were fighting, about monitoring safety constantly, about communicating with parents about what happened while she was in charge, about handling emergencies alone. By the time she finished describing it, she understood. She’d been a project manager. She’d been running a complex operation with multiple stakeholders and limited resources and zero room for failure, because if something went wrong with someone’s kids, that’s not a recoverable failure. That’s a life-ruining failure. So you don’t let it happen.

She went on to run a design studio. Not because I was a brilliant coach. But because someone outside the skill finally told her what they saw, and once she knew the words for what she was doing, she could do it on purpose instead of just by accident.

The problem is that we’re terrible judges of our own value because we’re inside it. The server doesn’t see coordination and pressure management. They see taking orders and bringing food. The military person doesn’t see leadership and systems thinking. They see following orders. The babysitter doesn’t see project management and emergency response. They see watching kids. And until someone outside the skill names it, until someone says I see this thing you’re doing and it has a value and a name and a price tag, you keep underestimating yourself. You keep thinking you’re not skilled at anything. You just work. You do what you’re supposed to do. You figure things out as they come up.

The thing is, that’s exactly what the most valuable people in the world do. They figure things out. They manage constraints. They communicate across conflicts. They maintain quality under pressure. They’re responsible. They’re present. They don’t make excuses. But they’re sitting at home on Sunday night dreading Monday morning, writing a resume that says I was a server for three years, not understanding that what they actually wrote was I’m the kind of person who can be trusted with other people’s basic needs.

If you’re reading this and you’re sitting with a resume that looks like a list of things you were supposed to do, stop. Stop thinking about it as a resume. Start thinking about it as evidence of the things you’re actually capable of. What were you responsible for? Not responsible for doing correctly, but responsible for. That’s leadership, even if nobody called it that. What did you learn to do better because you did it repeatedly? That’s mastery. What were the worst-case scenarios you had to be ready for? That’s risk management. You probably don’t have the vocabulary for it yet, but the skill is there. And once you see it, once someone outside of your life says I see that thing, and it has value, and it’s worth something, you’ll be able to stop apologizing for not having gone to business school and start understanding that business school just teaches you the words for things you already know how to do.