Gaps in Your CV – What Gaps?

Career breaks are still seen as something you need to explain, justify, or, ideally, avoid altogether. But is time away from paid work really a “gap”? And does this way of thinking still fit the reality of today’s world of work?

Very often, when I work with clients in coaching sessions or workshops on their application documents, a question comes up – usually accompanied by a slightly worried look:

“What should I do about the gaps in my CV?”

“What gaps?” I ask.

“Well, the times when I wasn’t working.”

“And what were you doing during that time?” I ask.

And that’s where the real story begins.

Usually, those supposed “gaps” turn out to have been some of the most intense, and sometimes most difficult, periods in my clients’ lives.

The largest group I work with is women. For many of them, career breaks were connected with motherhood. Many of my clients also have migration experience. For them, a break often meant building an entirely new life in a new country: learning a new language, dealing with bureaucracy, looking for work, and helping the whole family settle in and adjust to their new surroundings.

For others, it was difficult life experiences that disrupted their usual rhythm for a longer period of time – their own illness or the illness of someone close to them, the loss of someone, divorce, relocation or job loss. For many, the pandemic was one of those experiences too.

Many situations in life can make it difficult or completely impossible to work. Whether a break was your own decision or the result of circumstances beyond your control, it is part of your life. Not something to be ashamed of.

But what about your CV?

Some people still follow the classical school of CV writing, which expects you to list and explain every single stage of your career. I prefer a somewhat more modern approach, one that focuses on what is relevant to the particular role rather than on completeness. This also includes the trend towards concise, sometimes one-page CVs.

This isn’t really about aesthetics. It’s about simple pragmatism. Research suggests that recruiters spend an average of just 43 seconds reviewing a CV. Yes, seconds. In that short amount of time, your CV needs to show whether you have the skills they are looking for. Turning it into a chronicle of your entire life makes that task much harder.

Nobody is going to examine every single stage of your life with a magnifying glass, count the months you weren’t employed, and wonder whether you used them “productively” enough. And if someone does, perhaps they are more interested in finding a problem than in finding a good employee. You probably don’t want to work for someone like that anyway.

So focus primarily on the experiences that have shaped your profile the most and that are relevant to the position you are applying for.

Are “gaps in your CV” even a problem anymore?

The very idea that gaps in a CV are inherently something negative fits less and less with today’s labour market.

Our careers are no longer as linear as they once were. We change employers, positions, industries and sometimes even professions. We continue our education and retrain. We move to other countries and build new lives there. We start businesses and close them again. We take time out for children, caring for family members, further education, a sabbatical, or simply to figure out what we want to do next.

Some of these changes come from personal choices; others are forced upon us by a labour market that is changing faster and faster.

Our work culture and our expectations of professional life are changing too. We want to find fulfilment in our work, try new things and find meaning in what we do. Hardly anyone today assumes that a career or employer chosen once should last until retirement. And that is something wonderful!

So the problem isn’t the gaps themselves. It’s the way we have learned to look at them.

I once had a client …

She was about 25 and close to finishing university when she became a mother and initially stayed at home with her child. Her husband pursued his career, and his job required the family to move from country to country on a regular basis.

Over time, there were three children, and she was now in her mid-forties.

Over the course of twenty years, her family lived in six countries. Each time, she was the one who found a home, organised schools and nurseries, dealt with the paperwork and rebuilt the everyday life of a family of five from scratch in a new place.

She learned three languages – not out of passion, but out of necessity: to communicate with authorities, schools and doctors, help her children with their education and find her way in a new environment.

When she wanted to enter the labour market after all those years, her CV looked very modest at first glance. From a classical perspective: no professional experience. A hopeless situation.

But when we took a closer look at what she had actually been doing during those twenty years and tried to translate her experiences into the language of the labour market, the picture suddenly looked very different.

Organisation and logistics. Time management. Coordinating multiple processes at once. Intercultural communication. Problem-solving and crisis management. Flexibility and adaptability. Resilience. Negotiating with authorities and institutions – in several languages and across different cultural environments.

I’m not suggesting that we can simply put those twenty years on her CV as “20 years of project management experience”.

But we can do something much more important: recognise the skills she genuinely developed during those years. And many of them are exactly what companies are looking for in employees today.

Her story is not an exception. I meet many women who look at their CVs and see, above all, what is missing. Only when they look at their own story from a different perspective do they begin to recognise how much they have done, learned and built over those years – and what they are truly capable of today.

All of this doesn’t mean that every door will be open to you or that you’ll get any job you want. But that certainly doesn’t make the situation hopeless. Quite the opposite: it’s a good starting point for whatever comes next.

Own it!

So the next time you look at your CV and see a “gap”, don’t start by asking:

“How am I going to explain it?”

Ask yourself first:

“What actually happened during that time?”

Not every answer needs to go on your CV. Not everything life has taught you needs to become a bullet point on LinkedIn. And not every break needs to be sold as a period of extraordinary “personal growth”.

Sometimes things were simply hard. Sometimes it was just about getting through, recovering, or taking care of something that mattered more than work at that particular moment.

Your career path doesn’t have to be perfect or linear. It can include changes, new beginnings, periods of inactivity, and decisions that might not look ideal from the perspective of a CV.

Own it. A gap in your CV is not a gap in your life.

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When you look at your CV, do you see the gaps before anything else?

If it's hard to put your own experience into perspective and see its real value, an outside perspective can help. That's exactly what coaching can do: make visible what you truly bring to the table.

Contact me!