Functional Resume
A functional resume is rather uncommon in most fields and as such, if you're very happy with your resume, you probably should just stick with what you have. However, if when you look at your resume in its current form (likely as a chronological resume), and have trouble seeing yourself as a great sell to employers, it might be worth trying to highlight your resume skills through a functional resume.
The key point to a functional resume is that it makes the resume skills section the prime focus. Rather than list your work experience in chronological order, you focus on your skills in a paragraph form. As such, a functional resume appears more like a series of short answers rather than as a set of bullets.
A functional resume is typically broken into four categories: Objective, Summary of Skills, Professional Accomplishments, and Education. I think it's helpful as a reference to also list past employment as a brief list of companies, but this is entirely optional.
Why Use A Functional Resume?
One question we get a lot is why would anyone use a functional resume? Since chronological resumes are so much more common, functional resumes can often put off an employer. Here are the cases when it would be more useful to use a functional resume.
First, have you bounced around in your career a lot? If you don't have a clear job focus in the past, a functional resume can be a nice way to condense the resume skills you learned in the variety of jobs and to highlight the common links between them.
Second, do you have large gaps in your employment history or are you a college student with limited work experience? In both of these cases, the functional resume can be a good way to downplay your lapses in employment and sell you on your strengths.
Lastly, if you're an older worker or someone who might appear to have too much experience for the applied for job, it can be better to use a functional resume. In these cases, downplaying your lengthy work experience can work well on a functional resume as your looking more at your skills and not at a giant list.