But Steve, Employers Require Proof of Your Skills

They certainly do! They call your old employers. They call your friends. They look what you've been doing on social media. They look for your work on GitHub. They might find out if you don't have years of experience, or even months, in the skills you claimed. And if you claimed years you don't have, they'll pass you over as a liar.

Of course, if you're missing a job requirement, you're screened out anyway.

Here's another fact: Sometimes you can manage to claim years of a core skill you just learned. Your competitors are doing it. It happens all the time. In a tight economy, the successful candidate has usually done some truth-stretching. Do you want the job to go to someone less truthful and less competent than you? In the long run, would your employer?

Even if you totally reject juicing up your resume to the slightest degree, you can apply for jobs in which you're competent in all the core requirements, using the Rapid Learning process to learn those "also need" skills. If you make it to an interview, you can discuss those skills intelligently, making a great impression.

Steve Litt's Truthfulness Principles

I believe it's immoral, impractical, and sometimes dangerous to claim more years of experience than you have, unless:

You're willing to do whatever it takes to make your on the job performance match your experience claims, even if this means working 100 hours per week for 40 hours pay for awhile. In other words, your employer should never suspect that the skills and years on your resume were inflated.
You understand and are willing to accept the risk of being fired at a later date if they find out your resume was "enhanced".
You commit to never, ever, ever claiming degrees, certifications, or licenses you don't have. Discovery of such claims not only gets you fired, but is often reported on the nightly news, and in certain circumstances can land you in jail.

Summary

You can use Rapid Learning techniques to quickly learn the basics of a job's skill requirements. At the very least, this enables you to discuss those skills intelligently in an interview. Whether, and to what extent, you exaggerate skills is up to you, dependent on your personal beliefs, your tolerance of risk, on your actual knowledge, on your ability to perform as if the exaggeration were true, and on your ability to withstand the extended unemployment thrown at those missing a single skill in a list of ten.

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