Stay At Home Mom Resume Example

If you’ve been a stay-at-home mom for the past 5 or even more years, returning back to work can feel extremely exciting and frightening.

Check out this article provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics on stay-at-home mothers through the years.


After such a large gap in your employment history, you may feel like your skills have gotten a bit rusty. And you may even feel like you don’t have much to offer as a part of the workforce. The good news is that it’s not quite true. You have all it takes to land a job and, with this guide, you are just a few scrolls away from your killer stay at home mom resume example.

First of all, even if you’ve been out of the game for some time, you still have some experiences to put on your stay at home mom resume. Besides, needless to say, that stay-at-home moms do have some real superpowers. So, all you need is to know a few tricks for transforming all you have into a flawless resume.

In this guide, you’ll discover dozens of head-turning stay at home mom resumes examples, and actionable tips for creating your own resume. Follow through to learn what makes a resume perfect and get ready for your grandiose return to the workforce.

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How To Write a Stay At Home Mom Resume

Writing a convincing job application that can make potential employers want to recruit and eventually employ you isn’t an easy task when you’ve been out of the workforce for a while. You may have the right level of qualification, excellent education, and even lots of relevant professional experience. But, if your experience gap is too big, rejoining the workforce can be tough.

To get back into the game, you will need to craft a winning resume that will drive the recruiter’s attention and get you employed. As you can guess, ensuring success as a stay at home parent won’t be easy. So, it’s quite natural if you are wondering how to write a resume being a stay-at-home mom.

To get you started, let’s look at some basic tips:

  1. Tailor your resumes to a stay at home mom job description. Using a stay at home mom job description for resume helps you avoid making a generic resume that doesn’t stand out.
  1. Focus on the key skills you already have.
  1. Distract recruiters from your experience gap by putting the experiences section near the bottom of a resume, using only years for work dates, and drawing more attention to the skills section.
  1. Boost your chances to succeed in the job search by acquiring new skills.
  1. Complement your resume with a powerful cover letter.

Choose the Right Template for a Stay At Home Mom Resume

Now, let’s move to the actionable steps for writing a brilliant resume for stay at home mom. The first thing to take care of is the formatting and template for your resume.

The truth is, even if you’ve been out of the workforce for years, you still got everything to succeed. All you need is to lay it out for the recruiter the right way. So, here are a few handy tips for choosing a perfect stay at home mom resume template that will help you engage recruiters and employers:

  • The reverse-chronological format is your best bet. Often, writing guides advise using a functional resume format in resumes for stay at home moms as it allows you to “hide” the gaps. But, your goal is not to hide but to explain your gaps.
  • Don’t go over the limits with your design, fonts, and other elements. Keep it simple and clean.
  • Structure your resume with consistent headings.
  • Don’t make it cluttered with the info and leave lots of white space.
  • Convert to PDF.

How to Write a Resume for Stay At Home Mom with No Experience

Writing a solid stay at home mom resume is hard by default as you will have to explain to the hiring managers why you had these huge gaps in your employment history. But, if you have no employment history at all, things get even tougher. Or, at least, so it seems.

Here are a few tips to help make resume sample for stay at home mom returning to work and still prove you are a great employee:

  1. Start with a resume objective.
  1. Put your education and skills sections higher.
  1. Emphasize the skills you have.
  1. Add extra sections.
  1. Bonus Tip: Consider an online job.

In this guide, we will also share with you a well-written sample resume created by pro resume writers for stay at home mom at Skillhub with no work experience created by one of our experts with years of experience in the resume writing business. Be sure to check it out to see how these tips work in practice.

Put Your Education on Resume or a Stay At Home Mom

The education requirements will always get down to the type of job you’d like to occupy. For example, opting for a job in finance, you will probably need at least a BA in a relevant field, but you may not be required to have a degree if you apply for a stay at home job. Despite this, the education section should always be included on a resume stay at home mom. After all, even if it’s not required for a job, at least it will help you make the right impression and get more interviews.

Besides, a solid education section can make up for the lack of experience or large gap.

Here is how to make it flawless:

  • Don’t list only the highest level of education. Expand your section with other entries.
  • Include such basic details as:
  • School name/location
  • Study years
  • Degree
  • Major
  • Provide extra info, such as minors (if any), relevant coursework, GPA, awards & honors, and other valuable accomplishments.

Put Skills on a Stay At Home Mom Resume

Whether you do or don’t have previous work experience, be sure that you do have plenty of vital skills. In fact, if you are a stay at home mom returning to work you probably have much more to offer employers than you could think. All you need to do is to prove this to the hiring manager and you will become a worthy applicant.

To put skills on a stay at home mom resume sample the right way, simply list the key soft and hard skills in a separate section. Also, don’t forget to include the best skills in your resume summary or objective and confirm them in your education and experience sections.

Here is a list of some of the most valuable stay at home mom resume skills job seekers may want to have in their applications:

  • Organizational skills
  • Teamwork
  • Computer & Internet skills
  • Adaptability
  • Self-motivation
  • Written and verbal communication
  • Strong ability to work under stress and pressure
  • Leadership
  • Time management skills
  • Multi-tasking
  • Conflict resolution
  • Decision making
How many mistakes are acceptable on a resume? Are you at risk?

Add Contact Info to Your Resume

If you ask us what is the most integral part inherent in every sample resume for stay at home mom, that’s definitely a contact info section.

It should include:

  • Full name
  • Phone number (important: updated and error-free)
  • Professionally-looking email address
  • Extras like links to your social media accounts.
Pro Tip: Please note that depending on the stay home moms jobs you are applying for, you may also need to show what you’re capable of through a personal portfolio. If that’s the case, be sure to make a clear and inspiring portfolio and include the link in the contact info section.

Add Other Sections to Your Effective Resume

Whether you have many years of experience gap or no past employment history at all, you will need to compensate for that through other sections of your resume. First of all, as you already know, you will need to emphasize your skills and education sections. But even that’s not all.

If you are wondering how to get a job after being a stay at home mom for 20 years, we recommend showing recruiting firms more of you with additional resume sections. Extra sections help to make up for the lack of experience and showcase your personality. Therefore, they can significantly boost your chances of being hired because (despite a common belief) employers are looking to hire humans, so they would love to learn more about your true self. 

So, what extra sections can help you land the working at home mom jobs of your choice? Here are some ideas you can use for your stay at home mom resumes samples:

  • Languages - Knowing a foreign language gives a competitive advantage.
  • Volunteering - Volunteering experiences on stay at home mom resume samples always attract attention.
  • Hobbies & interests - If you have hobbies and interests that somehow align with the job, they can be a great addition to your resume.

Add Cover Letter to Your Stay At Home Mom Resume

If you are just about to return to the workforce after a large break, you will need to seek every possibility to impress the recruiters and grab it. Namely, to land a solid work at home mom job, you will need to prepare a killer cover letter.

Even if you have a job-winning sample resume for stay at home moms, a cover letter is one more opportunity to give your career a head start. So, you should make use of this opportunity.

Now, how can one create a top-notch stay at home mom resume cover letter? Here are the main points to keep in mind while writing:

  1. Keep it concise, meanwhile providing maximum value.
  1. Organize your cover letter well.
  1. Write it in a clear, formal, and positive tone.
  1. Get straight to the point.
  1. Use it to showcase your communication skills, stand out from the crowd of competitors, and make your application memorable.

Use Key Action Verbs

Why do you need resume keywords and action verbs on your resume for a stay at home mom going back to work? There are 3 big reasons:

  1. This way you avoid cliches and generic phrases.
  1. It helps your resume get noticed by the applicant tracking system (ATS).
  1. It helps make the right impression on recruiters.

But, what words exactly do you need to use? Here is a list of effective action verbs to consider:

  • Participated
  • Volunteered
  • Contributed
  • Spearheaded
  • Fostered
  • Executed
  • Developed
  • Handled
  • Improved
  • Achieved
  • Managed
  • Designed
  • Refined
  • Increased
  • Accomplished
  • Secured
  • Succeeded in
  • Acquired
  • Negotiated
  • Persuaded
  • Delegated
  • Conveyed
  • Gathered
  • Operated
  • Headed

Stay At Home Mom Returning To Work Resume

The tips and steps we’ve shared so far work for all types of resumes. However, if you are writing a stay at home mom returning to work resume specifically, there are a few more tips we’d like to give you.

If you are returning to the workforce, write a skills-focused resume. When writing your sample resume stay at home mom returning to work, you want to emphasize your skills from the time when you were professionally active, as well as those skills you gained afterward. And don’t let your employment gap distract you, if the gap was too big, you just need to de-emphasize this section of your resume.

Start your resume with a summary instead of an objective. List a few key skills and professional achievements, and quantify them where possible.

In this guide, you can find many great resume for stay at home mom returning to work examples. Be sure to check them out to see what you should do to land an interview with ease.

Work From Home Resume

Things can be a bit more tricky when applying for a stay at home work. The problem is that employers can’t really test your skills before they hire you for a particular job, which is why they will be even more attentive when checking your resume.

Here are a few tips to help you nail a work from home resume:

  • Make an extensive experiences section. List all relevant jobs and add 3-5 bullet points. You may also list positions that are not relevant to the job you are applying for, but you should indicate transferable skills.
  • Use relevant keywords.
  • List your strongest soft and hard skills.
  • If you need a portfolio, create one and add a link to your contact info section.
  • Find ways to build up some useful and relevant qualifications and/or skills.
  • Also, when applying for a stay at home job, be ready to complete some sort of a test task.
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