With today’s highly competitive technical market and hundreds of new
candidates entering this industry every single day, how can you be sure
that your technical resume will stand out? Included is a brief overview of
what your resume SHOULD be "doing" for you, as well as a few good techie
tips to get you started.
Working – Your resume has a job to do, so make it work! Today’s resumes
are more of a marketing advertisement for who you are and what you can
offer, rather than just a professional list of what you’ve done. You will
be competing against hundreds of equally qualified candidates so you
absolutely HAVE to set yourself above the competition through an effective
combination of content, verbiage and presentation. Think a bit "outside"
the box and expand on your responsibilities by demonstrating how those
activities contributed to results!
Focusing – Who are you, where do you want to go and how do you want to
be recognized? If you’re a senior manager (or aiming to get there), you
don’t want a resume filled with information about your help-desk skills,
programming languages or debugging strengths! Conversely, you can’t really
talk about becoming the CTO without outlining the skills OTHER than your
technical expertise, such as project management, team leadership, systems
administration, IT needs assessment, etc. If your goal is to remain /
become more of a hands-on worker, then it’s fine to provide a specific
section that outlines the primary skills specific to your industry, but
not necessarily all of them. For example, if your goal is to become a
network administrator, focus more on those relevant skills (network
planning, systems integration, software configuration) and NOT the years
you spent learning COBAL. Remember – relevance is key and some people find
it helpful to refer to a specific job ad/posting before writing their
resume to make sure that the resume and requirements are both speaking the
same language!
Profiling – A professional profile works much better than just a plain
old objective; better yet, it’s not as limiting. You can still be clear
about your job goals, but a summary or qualifications statement will
immediately help set you apart. See the below "Before and After" of this
approach.
- Objective: A position as a systems analyst where I can grow professionally in a challenging organization. (Yawn)
- Profile: Experienced systems analyst and technical support manager supported by the ability to drive system
design and architecture improvements to meet evolving business needs.
Proven ability to determine technical, operational and financial
viability of technical solutions as they relate to business objectives.
Marketing – Rather than outlining a litany of responsibilities such
as troubleshooting, developing and building, SELL those abilities through
action verbs and results. Compare the following two statements:
- Implement new credit reporting system.
- Implemented new credit reporting system which helped reduce
billing error rates by 25% and eliminated need for overtime.
See? You’ve just made your system implementation skills much more exciting and valuable to the reader!
Formatting – Not only do your words have to drive the call to action
(i.e., the call to your phone!) but your presentation has to impress the
reader enough to capture that immediate attention. Using a template just
doesn’t work – do you know how many people use the “Word” templates to
create their resumes? Can you imagine wading through hundreds of them on a
daily/weekly basis? Additionally, you can be a bit more flexible with your
page length. While it’s not necessary for an entry-level computer
programmer to have more than one page, it’s quite possible for a CIO to
utilize three or four. As for design issues, you certainly don’t want to
submit your resume on flowery paper (while innovative, probably won’t
work), you can use nice formatting lines that separate your education,
experience, summary and skills sections so that it’s easier to read and
see "what you’re all about."
Hopefully, these tips will streamline your resume process. However, if you
find yourself pulling out your hair or banging on those computer keys as
you try to find just the right verbiage, you may wish to consider
utilizing a professional resume service.
About the Author:
Kim Little
Why Shouldn't We Hire You?
Effective Personal Marketing