Resume Example With an Employment Gap
What to put where the dates stop — and why the format most people reach for makes it worse.
A gap is a hole in a sequence of dates. That is the entire technical problem. Everything else — the dread, the advice to hide it, the suggestion to restructure your whole resume around it — is a response to the hole, and most of those responses cost more than the hole did.
This example covers fourteen months away and deals with it in one line.
The resume
Tomás Vieira Lisbon, Portugal · tomas.vieira@example.com · +351 912 000 145
Summary
Bookkeeper with six years in small-business accounts, returning to full-time work after a period of family caregiving. Ran the ledger, VAT returns and payroll for a portfolio of eleven client companies. Certified in Primavera and Xero.
Experience
Career break — family caregiving March 2025 – May 2026
- Full-time care for a parent after a stroke. Kept the Xero certification current and completed the 2026 VAT changes update in March.
Bookkeeper — Ferreira & Costa Contabilidade, Lisbon January 2020 – February 2025
- Held the full ledger for eleven client companies, from sole traders to a 30-person logistics firm.
- Prepared and filed quarterly VAT returns across the portfolio, with no late filings in five years.
- Ran monthly payroll for around 90 employees in total, including the shift to the new social security reporting in 2023.
- Took over the two largest clients when a colleague left, without adding hours, by moving both onto Xero from spreadsheets.
Accounts Assistant — Grupo Almeida, Lisbon September 2018 – December 2019
- Purchase ledger and supplier reconciliation for a retail group with four sites.
Education
Licenciatura in Management — ISCTE Lisbon, 2018
Skills
Xero · Primavera · VAT returns (Portugal) · Payroll · Bank reconciliation · Excel
Why it is written this way
The gap is an entry, not a silence
The break sits in the experience list, in date order, with a heading and one line. That placement does three things at once: the chronology has no unexplained hole, the reader gets the answer before they can form the question, and the resume never looks like it is hiding something.
Compare it to the alternative everyone tries first — removing the dates, or switching to years only so that 2020–2025 and 2026– sit next to each other and the fourteen months disappear. Recruiters have seen that trick for decades. It reads as concealment, and it converts a neutral fact into a reason for suspicion.
One line, no apology, no detail
“Full-time care for a parent after a stroke” is enough. It is true, it is a reason any adult understands, and it closes the subject.
What does not belong there is a paragraph, a justification, or an assurance that you are now fully available. Length signals discomfort. The single line signals that you consider this unremarkable — which is the frame you want the reader to adopt, and they usually will.
You are also under no obligation to disclose a medical reason, your own or anyone’s. “Career break — family reasons” carries the same weight with less disclosure. Pick the version you are comfortable repeating in an interview, because you will.
The one useful thing in the gap goes in the gap
Keeping the certification current, and doing the VAT changes update, is the only professionally relevant thing that happened in those fourteen months — so it is the only thing listed. It answers the real worry behind the question, which is not “where were you” but “are you current”.
If nothing professional happened, write nothing. An invented course is worse than a blank line, and a genuine one that is irrelevant is padding.
Do not switch to a functional resume
The standard advice for gaps is to use a functional or skills-based layout, which groups everything by capability and drops the chronology. It is the worst thing you can do here, for two separate reasons.
Recruiters know exactly what that format is for, so it announces the gap more loudly than the gap would have. And it parses badly: with no dates attached to employers, an applicant tracking system often cannot reconstruct your work history at all, and you can end up with an empty experience section — see how to check if your resume is ATS-friendly for what to look for.
Reverse chronological, with the break in its place, is both more honest and more machine-readable.
What the evidence actually says
Gaps are studied, and the findings are less dramatic than the advice industry implies: a gap can reduce callback rates, the effect is larger the longer and the more recent it is, and an explained gap fares better than an unexplained one. What none of the research supports is the idea that a gap is disqualifying, or that concealing it improves your odds.
Treat it as a fact with a modest cost, not a wound. The wording above is the whole of the mitigation available, and it is sufficient.
Phrasing of the bullets themselves — outcomes rather than duties, and what to delete — is covered in the customer service resume example.
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