I was in a kind of down mood yesterday, and I wasn't sure I could pinpoint why. I think it had to with the job networking group meeting i attended yesterday morning.

It's a very small group. This is a plus, in that you get a fair amount of individualized attention, but also a disadvantage, since you don't have the benefit of rubbing shoulders with a wide swath of unemployed people.

Everyone else aside from the co-leaders, a husband and wife team, were male and over 45 with fairly senior level job histories.

I usually pick up a few nuggets of useful info at these sessions, even though others' career paths can be radically different from mine.

I think I was feeling disheartened because many of the others that spoke that day seemed to have some activity to report, whether it was coming in second in a job interview process or some impressive consulting work. I had to compare it to my own practically non-existent job search where I've seen no "perfect match" jobs for many weeks. (There was one guy there, a newcomer, who readily admitted that he's done basically no job searching for the past 6 months and had something of a bad attitude. I secretly related to him.)

On top of that, one of the co-leaders said the reason why attendance at these meetings has dropped off lately is becus she believed more people have found jobs. Nothing like that to make you feel like a loser.

I did get a copy of something someone else there used to supplement his resume and which he presented at the job interview. It was a more visual way to organize his work skills, plus a listing of 30-day deliverables and 60- to 90-day deliverables.

It's pretty tough to come up with credible deliverables before you've even gone on the job interview. You have to know to a fairly accurate degree what the job will entail. Still, he said the people he showed it to seemed very impressed, and he felt it helped him stand out compared to other job candidates.

So I'm going to try to adapt his stuff to my own situation. It will use his handout only as a springboard and be mostly different from what he did. I think I can make mine more meaningful.

Basically, I'm going to create a visual chart that organizes my background, not by the job, as my resume does, but by grouping key skill sets in 3 or 4 major categories. It could, perhaps, make the info more readable for someone who dislikes wading through dense resumes like mine. (Some people who may have job-hopped a little too much over the years prefer to do their resume in this way because it camouflages gaps or short-term job stints, although I think most employers prefer the traditional job-by-job format.)

That's not really what the guy at the job meeting did; he worked at the same Fortune 500 for 18 years and simply created 4 ascending vertical columns for each job title at that company, then listed by bullets the different key skills he used. To me, his version was a little redundant with what likely appeared on his resume. It was like a reshuffling of the same info.

It will take me a while to come up with my 3 or 4 key categories, I think, because I'll want to broaden my skill sets as much as possible.

The big question which I face all the time is, should i make this focus on my financial services, real estate and Internet marketing background primarily, or should i broaden it to include marketing in general, in case I get an interview with a non-financial services or real estate company? My work experience is rather heavily concentrated in financial services and real estate, which is helpful in establishing me as an "expert," but it also narrows the field.

I suppose once i get one version of this done, it would be easier to adapt it to specific jobs, just as i do now, to a certain extent, with my resume.