Ask a Career Consultant
Hi there! Every week, the Career Development Team for Researchers at the Office of Career and Professional Development answers an anonymized career development question from the UCSF community. You can also visit the archive of all of our past columns. To submit your own question, email it to [email protected] with the subject line 'ASKOCPD.'
A postdoc asks—
Once I finish my postdoc next month, I’m planning to take some time off to deal with a personal family situation. How long of a gap is ok on a resume?
Gaps on resumes are ok! Depending on what kind of jobs you will be applying for, gaps on a resume can actually be hard to spot. Since a resume is organized by relevant experience, employers are not expecting to see an exhaustive list of everything you’ve done (that’s a CV!). It’s expected that relevant experiences will have happened at different times throughout your career thus far, and not that everything will line up perfectly chronologically. Generally anything less than a year won’t be an issue, even on a CV.
-Ray Care, Program Director, Career Development Team for Researchers