Career gap
Also called employment gap, resume gap.
A period without formal employment on your work history — normal, common, and mostly a problem only when it's left unexplained.
Gaps are far less disqualifying than the anxiety around them suggests. Layoffs, caregiving, illness, study, and deliberate time off are all ordinary, and post-2020 recruiting norms absorbed them. What still causes trouble is an unexplained hole that a reader has to fill in themselves, because the story they invent is rarely the flattering one.
The mechanical fix is to make the gap visible and bounded rather than hidden. Use years rather than months if that closes a short one honestly. For a longer one, give it a line with a plain label — career break, caregiving, full-time study — and one clause of context. That's it. It is not a confession and doesn't need a paragraph.
If you did anything structured during it — a certification, freelance work, an open-source project, a substantial volunteer role — it belongs in the history as an entry, not in a footnote. It converts an absence into a period with content.
Resume summary
Two or three lines at the top of a resume stating what you do, at what level, and what you're aiming at.
Reverse-chronological resume
The standard resume format, listing roles newest first — the layout recruiters and parsers both expect.