However, even if you’re not quite looking to move on, you never know when/if you’ll want to leave – or under unfortunate circumstances – have to leave. It’s for this reason that it’s good to update your resume, not after you leave your employer, but while you’re there and everything’s fresh. However, it’s sometimes difficult to know where to start, so here’s a few tips to get you going.

Note Daily Tasks as You Accomplish Them

Of course, being an executive you don’t have time to note your every move; however, it’s a good idea to keep track of the tasks that you complete as you complete them. The reason that it’s better to keep track of what you do in real time rather than when you’re ready to look for your next gig is because everything’s fresh in your mind at the time.

Think about it. How often do you complain to yourself about your workload, mentally listing everything that you’ll have to do? By this point, probably hundreds if not thousands of times. This is the perfect time to note it all down. Remember, you can always simply sort everything out later if you don’t have time to do it during the project–just copy your notes or to do list.

Keep Track of Exceptional Events

In addition to the goals that you fulfill on a regular basis, you want to be sure to keep track of the exceptional events. Whether you gave a leadership speech that resulted in a new way of operating the company, or you pushed a team of managers through a successful initiative that earned the company tons of money, you want to make sure that you keep track of what occurred.

These exceptional events are usually career-defining moments and something that you want to make sure you’re able to summarize effectively. So rather than minimizing your success later down the line because you’ve forgotten the pertinent details, take time to jot down what occurred while in the moment.

Make Sure to Note the Specifics

When keeping track of the details, don’t forget to make them specific. That is, if you’re jotting down a specific project that you initiated and oversaw, be specific about the number of people you managed, how much money and what items were listed in the budget, how much money was made, how many hours your employees worked, etc. The idea is to be as specific as possible so that a prospective employer down the line can visualize your contributions to a tee.

Hopefully you’ve gotten a chance to see just how beneficial it could be to work on your executive resume while still working. Of course, many people choose to wait until they’re between jobs to update a resume, but why do things the hard way?

While you can’t guarantee a perfect job search, you can certainly refine and renew your approach and your resume to keep it on track. If you find that your executive job search is beginning to stall, keep it going with a few of these tips.

Make Some Unique Adjustments to Your Resume

If your traditional resume isn’t pulling in the attention you want, you may have the wave the red flag at the bull. In other words, you may have to say some things that may get a recruiter or employer’s attention. For online applications, this can mean using a more attention-getting title. Rather than simply restating the title of the position you’re applying for (i.e. “Executive Sales Director), you might use one that draws people in (i.e. “Executive Sales Director at 123 Trading Led Team to Record $1 Million Revenue in 2008”).

Another unique resume strategy would be to list the logos of past (or current) employers on the left-hand side of your resume. Logos and snapshots from your college(s) and any awards you’d received during your collegiate career are also valuable. These images display a powerful look at your background and qualifications, and make a large impact without words. You might also vary the system that you use to deliver your resume–if you use email often, try using regular mail, or vice versa.

Adding A Smart P.S. to your Cover Letter

In a continued effort to stand out among your competition, you might also consider adding a “p.s” to your resume’s cover letter. One reason is that in this section you can add one or two tidbits about yourself that the employer may not know. But an even more important reason is that, if nothing else gets read in the cover letter, the “p.s” will – in fact, it may draw the employer in first then intrigue him enough to work backwards and read the entire cover letter.

So what do you say in your “p.s.”? You may take a chance and namedrop. For instance, you might say something like “Call me ASAP to find out why Dr. George Rudford from Impressive University believes that I’m the best sales executive in the country.” You might just want to add a personal statement that explains why you’re a good executive hire for the prospective employer’s business.

Broaden Your Contact Scope

After years as an executive, you may have a healthy list of contacts to connect with as you seek job opportunities. However, if you haven’t had much success with your contact list in your job search, it’s time to make a few additions. LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, and similar professional networking websites can help you find millions of like-minded professionals in any field.

A dragging executive job search isn’t the end of the world, it just means that you may have to light a fire – better yet, a towering inferno – under your own you-know-what. In almost no time at all, you’ll take your executive job search to the next level, as long as you’re able to push yourself and stay creative and motivated.

Executive level temp jobs can be as challenging as full-time jobs, and they’re certainly worthy of respect. So as you write your resume, don’t feel that your temp positions deserve anything less that the treatment you would give a permanent position. Whatever you do, don’t leave these temp jobs out. Instead, learn how to add them on. Here are a few steps to consider:

Follow the Standard Resume Format

You may be tempted to use different resume format since you’re adding material that is not considered standard on your resume. However, you really need to make your resume seem as normal as possible when adding temporary positions. This means making your temp job entry the same as the other employment history entries on your resume.

How, then, can you show that the temp position was different in some way from your other positions? Well, since a temporary position isn’t exactly the same, you would simply add “temporary” at the end of your job title. For instance, if you were filling in as the Executive Communications Director then you would simply write “Executive Communications Director, Temporary” on your resume. You don’t need any other reference to the “temporary” part of the temporary position. If the employer has more questions during the interview then you can answer them then.

Make Sure to Add to Regular Job Section

Again, you want your temporary position to have the same feel as the other jobs on your resume. Keeping the temporary positions listed chronologically along with your more permanent positions is a good strategy. In other words, don’t create a separate “temporary” section. You really fulfilled the same duties and responsibilities of any permanent employee in the same position. Don’t diminish the job in any way–treat it as a real position?

Listing Your Agencies

If you were hired on a temporary basis through an agency, you do want to list the agency on your resume. If you had only one assignment through the agency then it’s a good idea to combine the assignment and agency into a single entry. In other words, you would list the job you worked for and your title then list the agency you worked for in the job description.

On the other hand, if you had multiple assignments through an agency then you want to list the agency in the place where you would normally list the company. If you want to list more than one of assignments you had with the agency, the will be listed as bullet points under the company. If you only want to list a single assignment, however, you’d want to put the agency’s name in the “company name” part of the listing, then detail your exact duties and name the business that had employed you temporarily under the “job description” section.

So now do you feel more comfortable with adding a temporary position to your resume? If so then there’s no better time than now to get started.

Of course, you know you’re not planning on walking away from your career anytime soon, but it’s sometimes hard to explain this to employers, which for many means disguising their age until they’re able to get to the interview. If this is something you’d like to try in your resume, here are some tips to consider:

Exclude Some Specifics of Your Professional Employment

One trick that you can use to disguise your age on your executive resume is to structure your professional employment so that it doesn’t focus on specific dates. For instance, if you’ve been working for over 20 years, you might summarize some of your early experience at the end of your resume – without dates – rather than including every job you’ve had chronologically.

Another option you have is to not mention the early years at all, unless they’re so impressive that you just can’t leave them out. For instance, if you worked in retail at a local department store and your latest job was president of the department store nationally, you might want to include this to show your fast progression throughout your career. If you’re trying to avoid showing your age, however, this link is too tenuous to include, as it doesn’t necessarily show your executive strength and it quite clearly gives away how old you are.

Exclude Dates for Your Education

Another exclusion you might consider for your resume is your graduation dates. By the time you’ve reached the executive level, the amount of knowledge, training and skills you’ve acquired probably far outweigh the education you received in 1968.

New technology has surfaced that wasn’t even thought of back then so there’s no way your schooling could have trained you for everything you know now. This isn’t to discredit or downplay what you’d learned at college, but remember that most of what’s helped you through the years was a form of on-the-job training. Telling an employer the exact date of your graduation unnecessarily shows your age, although it’s important to mention all the education you’ve picked up–just leave out exact dates.

When You Get to Your Interview …

So now you’ve been called in for an interview and you’re a little worried about becoming a victim of age bias. You should keep in mind, however, that the job interview is where you can really prove yourself. You are a strong candidate with tons of experience, so this is the time to showcase your knowledge, commitment to the organization, impressive ROIs and more.

Don’t let your age slow you down from getting the job you want. Your age can be a very positive thing, as older executives have more experience, skills, and accomplishments. If you don’t forget this as you write your resume and go to your interview, you should be able to snag a great position in no time.

But, of course, ultimately there’s no excuse for having a subpar executive resume. If you’re stuck, take a look at a few of these tips to help improve your executive resume writing skills.

Define a Clear Target

One of the first things you want to do when organizing your executive resume is to define a clear target. You should know the mission of the company you’re applying with, as well as what would be expected of you in the position you want. Otherwise, you can’t expect to speak effectively about why you’re the ideal candidate.

Make Sure to Brand Yourself

At this point, you should be known for contributing something to your field. It doesn’t matter what field you work in, it simply matters that your name is directly associated with your positive accomplishments and expert abilities. Your executive resume should focus a bit on branding yourself, and showing why you’re a different and better choice than the other applicants. Make special note of your unique, valuable attributes, characteristics that make you and only you the perfect leader for the job.

Include a Success Story or Two

Again, at your level, you should be known for having accomplished a lot. You want your resume to show all of your successes. As you know, many successes present themselves with challenges, so showing how these challenges were dealt with can be very beneficial.

Leave Room for White Space

When writing an executive resume, it’s often difficult to find a balance between including the right amount of information and leaving enough white space so that BlackBerry email cruisers won’t be overwhelmed with information. To give your resume a sense of balance for these devices, use short, topically relevant statements with a lot of value rather than drawn out sentences. Employers will appreciate an approach that’s easy to read, yet still filled with important information.

Edit and Re-edit

There is absolutely no excuse for having misspelled words or grammatical errors in your resume at the executive level. If you’re not the best speller or grammar buff, you most definitely should have everyone you can think of edit your resume to avoid the embarrassment of being overlooked for something so elementary.

Avoid Too Many Pages

You may have a lot of information you’d like to include in your resume due to your extensive experience; however, as you know, managers are busy people with little time to read pages of accomplishments. Don’t write five pages of extensive detail; instead, cut your resume down to a few pages with essential branding and information that markets your abilities and successes as a strong investment.

Hopefully these tips (and your short breather) have helped to give you some focus as you write your executive resume. Now it’s time to write the best resume you’ve ever laid eyes on.

At the executive level, a resume needs to provide a solid, full description of an entire career’s worth of accomplishments. If your executive resume is too short, here’s a look at a few ways to stretch it out while still maintaining your focus.

Tell Your Story

One way that you can stretch out your mini executive resume is to tell a story. Most people think of resumes as dry documents, but you can get a good relevant anecdote into yours. Resumes of the executive level have different rules, and a quick story with a point is certainly acceptable.

There are a number of ways to tell your story, including defining who you are and what you want to accomplish in your executive profile, which replaces the objective/summary of qualifications. Also, you can tell 2-3 sentence stories as you define each one of your accomplishments with who, what, when, where, why and how information.

Include Every Detail

One habit that most workers get into early in their careers that seems to be hard to get out of is thoroughly keeping track of accomplishments every step of the way. Most times we’re too busy working to even notice what we’ve done. When it comes time to write a resume, we’re often at a loss when trying to explain an accomplishment that happened a long, long time ago.

The only problem with this “non-strategy” of recordkeeping is that when it comes time to include these events in a resume, all of the details are all but lost. So we end up including basic descriptions instead of describing each event as it truly occurred. The more information you have about a certain event, though, the easier it is to stretch out the information in a resume without adding too much fluff. Take some time to pause occasionally and write down the important aspects of accomplishments–the sooner, the better.

Try to Avoid Half Pages

That nagging half page can be a major annoyance when working on your resume. It seems that just when you’re putting the last few bits of information in the document, an entire section shifts to a new page, leaving you with a partial page to deal with. This means you either have to subtract information, or add new details.

In a concise executive resume, this isn’t easy to do. You can, however, use your word processor to eliminate those half pages by slightly changing the margins and adjusting the size of the font, subtracting or adding a half number to the font size. You’re also able to change a font style to add some extra length as long as the new font maintains a degree of professionality. Don’t switch the font around too much within the document, though, as you need to have a consistent look.

Every little thing counts when you’re creating your resume, and length is no exception. While you’re spending time updating and making little resume changes, don’t ignore the resume’s length or you’ll be missing a great opportunity.