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Perhaps I'm in a small minority, but I find the date range selection for a position in the "experience" section of my Careers profile very restrictive.

For example, I'm currently finishing up my (bachelor's) degree, and I completed three internships along the way. The two most recent took place in 2012, but were not contiguous -- I'd be lying if I said I worked from January 2012 to December 2012, since I actually worked from January 2012 to April 2012 and then September 2012 to December 2012 (I should add it was on the same team/project, with the same title). There's no built-in option for this edge case. Cases like this also come up for seasonal work, recurring summer jobs, on/off part-time positions, etc.

I understand that letting users put any set of dates and formatting they like makes it very hard to properly sort things (for the "most recently" blurb), but since users are allowed to override the sorting anyway, wouldn't it be possible to add a "custom" free-text date option (perhaps length-limited to ensure it fits in the design)?

I've settled for putting "2012-2012", which is passable, but plain "2012" would be better (I know if I leave either "from" or "to" blank I can achieve this, but then the "most recently" blurb doesn't pick it up), with a custom plain-text range being my ultimate preferred option.

I guess I don't really have a question, but rather wanted to raise awareness of this problem and see if it's bothering anyone else (and therefore worth fixing).

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1 Answer 1

up vote 3 down vote accepted

The only yearly restrictive dates are for Education. If you add your internships to the experience section, you will also have the option to specify the months.

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Yes, but this requires splitting up the internships as if they were separate jobs -- in my case, they weren't (it was essentially one job, interrupted in the middle by a semester of school). The same applies for a recurring summer job (which I've also done, by the way). It wouldn't make sense to put the exact same job title and description twice in a row, just with two different dates. –  Cameron Mar 7 '13 at 19:40
As someone who regularly reviews resumes of people we're considering for hire, I have 2 pieces of advice. 1) it doesn't matter that you interned for the same company twice a few months apart, only what you did and how well you can describe what you did there, which leads to 2) as a programmer you should be solving problems; if you're doing the same thing now you did 3 months ago, your job is either data entry or not providing you with sufficient challenges. Or more likely you just need to rethink the descriptions of what you did a little more. –  Nick Larsen Mar 7 '13 at 23:36
Interesting point of view. I personally prefer a higher-level description (any job, after all, can be described at one of several levels of detail, from single day overviews to multi-year experiences -- and most multi-year jobs only get a single blurb on a résumé, not several). But I get your point. I'm going to accept this as the answer. –  Cameron Mar 10 '13 at 5:09

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