Ok, so I was flipping houses for a while (did alright - nothing special but all right), while doing so I maintained a couple of side jobs (contract interpreter and IT stuff - did a lot of maintenance work on hardware but also some web stuff). Last two years I’ve spent working on a little idea I’d hoped would be the “next big thing” - it… well failed spectacularly would be one way to put it. So now having to brush out the ol’ resume and I’m utterly stumped as to what to put in it for the intervening period.
Since this all happened over a fairly long stretch I kinda would like to keep it all in.
Self employed? Jack of all trades? Thought of separating them by date but it was all done at the same time…
Can anyone help?
Argh! I posted this in the wrong forum! Meant to go in IMHO… can’t figure out how to move it. Sorry in advance. 
Real Estate Trader (self-employed) maybe?
Well, IMHO, what you put on your resume depends on what job you’re applying for; you’ll want a completely different resume if you’re applying for an IT helpdesk job than if you’re applying for real estate investment analyst or something.
But that said, I think the general approach is to put them all down as separate jobs (they’ll have more or less the same dates, but that’s OK).
It’s fine to have overlapping employment dates on your resume; you don’t need everything sequential. “Entrepreneur” would be fine for the time you spent on the business idea. “Small Business Owner” might also be appropriate depending on what it was and what kind of job you are looking for. Real Estate Trader / Investor / Restoration could all work for the house flipping, again depending on what you did and how you want to portray it.
I would definitely list the things you did separately and be more specific than “self employed.”
PM a moderator, or report your own post and ask for it to be moved.
Thanks all! Great suggestions. Really helped.
