What will your next employer see when they look at your resume?

Will they see a thoughtful professional whose decisions are grounded in intention and commitment? Or will they see someone else, such as an untethered employee who isn’t sure what they want or where they belong?

There are many ways to ensure your experience, skills and personality are conveyed in your resume or CV, but the truth is, most hiring managers are first going to look at your work experience. What jobs have you held and for how long? And what does your professional history convey about who you are and the kind of employee you might be?

If the first thing a hiring manager notices is that you’ve bounced around a lot — between jobs, employers, careers — they may wonder whether they can count on you to commit to them.

They may wonder if you need a more intentional approach to your work — and to your career.

Explaining job-hopping

If you’re someone whose career trajectory looks less like the path up a ladder and more like the flight of a bumblebee — flitting from flower to flower in a random fashion — don’t assume you have a problem. I’ve seen many thriving professionals whose work histories looked utterly random.

What’s important is understanding how a series of quick moves from job to job without a clear trajectory might look to a hiring manager. If your job history looks more random than linear, you’ll want to prepare a coherent message that explains your work history, especially how it has shaped you into the great hire you are today.

If you can describe the thought process behind your career decisions, you can help any hiring manager see the bigger narrative that explains those choices. Craft your resume to tell that story, then prepare to add detail in interviews.

Here’s what that might look like:

Say you have a resume that shows an entry-level job in sales, some nice advancement in that field, a lateral move to bookkeeping and finally another sideways leap to marketing.

Now, suppose you have applied for your first leadership role. Looking at your path, a hiring manager might be a bit perplexed. Do you even know what you want?

The reality behind those decisions is you really liked starting your career in sales, but you quickly realized you wanted to grow and ultimately join the C-suite of a thriving company. You knew that to achieve that goal, you would need to understand disciplines well beyond sales, so after a period of growth in your early roles, you seized an opportunity to work in the bookkeeping department because you knew it would increase your exposure to finance, a critical area where leaders need to be fluent. After growing your finance portfolio, you made another shift — this time to marketing — to learn another core skill set.

To an uninformed observer, it may appear you are shopping around for a job or team you like, or perhaps even running away from a bad experience. But the truth is, you are on a path that makes you an exemplary hire. You bring self-awareness and skills that resonate across a company, making you a good candidate for an early leadership job.

That is a narrative that will get the attention of a hiring manager. It turns what looks like a random series of happenstance decisions into a thoughtful, intentional progression.

And isn’t thoughtful and intentional what every organization is ultimately looking for?

Intentional career design

As a professional executive coach, I’ve seen many approaches to career decision-making, including plenty of what can seem to a hiring manager to be job-hopping. What I’ve come to understand is that while there is a better way to make (and communicate about) career decisions, most of us never learned how to do this. We never learned how to make intentional decisions that not only tell a great story to hiring managers, but that also help us achieve greater success and satisfaction.

I call it intentional career design. It’s a model that roots decisions in self-awareness — about where you are today, where you hope to go tomorrow and (most importantly) why. It may ultimately result in some job-hopping, but only in service of your priorities. It also helps you explain those career choices in a thoughtful way because there was a purpose behind them.

Why intentional career design matters — to you and your future employers

Intentional career design is ultimately about making career decisions that serve you, today and over a lifetime. It’s also the mark of a potentially great hire.

Professionals who embrace intentional career design don’t make random, inexplicable leaps between jobs. They prioritize growth and smart decisions. And when they apply for a job, they are positioned to tell a story that conveys self-awareness and thoughtful decision-making in a contextual narrative that explains how and why a given job is right for them.

You can use this model to both explain the path that brought you to where you are today – and to chart an even more meaningful, successful way forward tomorrow.