Thursday, April 24, 2008

Resume - Work History

Typically the biggest component of your resume will be your work history.

You should list your jobs in reverse chronological order, most recent position first. You should also dedicate the most space to your most recent job, unless it was a brief stint. Likewise, you can provide successively less detail about earlier jobs.

Personally I like to see details about each job in bullet form, but since some resume parsing software may not like bullets you can also use essay form. Either way, you should keep the details relatively short and easy to read. However, if you listed the details of a job earlier in your resume in an ‘Accomplishments’ section you should expand on that in this section. Try to avoid having essentially the same text in both sections.

Some people like to list out each project they worked on at each job, but I feel that takes up too much space. You need to keep your resume down to 2 pages, remember. So try to limit each project to a single bullet point or 1-2 sentences.

For each position or project you should list the technologies you used, and more importantly, what was accomplished. Avoid getting bogged down in details, and definitely avoid using any company-specific terminology or abbreviations that no one outside your company will understand.

Here are some bad examples:

  • Used C#, ASP.NET, and SQL Server. (Used them to do what?)

  • Utilized ASP.NET for a Web development project. (Better, but tell me more details!)

  • Worked with Visual Studio 2005 as source control, wrote store procedures, business components and made UI changes. (Nice laundry list, but how does this show your competence in any of these areas?)

  • Worked closely with art department to prepare new artwork for various websites. (Just what skills or achievement does this illustrate?)

  • Enhanced APEX system to update TPS cover sheets. (What the heck does that mean?)

And here are some better examples:

  • Used C# and ASP.NET to develop a website consisting of over 30 aspx pages. (Shows tools used and results accomplished).

  • Re-engineered JavaScript code to reduce page load times by an average of 30%. (Illustrates quantifiable results).

  • Optimized SQL Server 2005 database by redesigning tables in third normal form, removing unused indexes, and adding covering indexes. Reduced data errors by 10% and improved query times by approximately 20%. (Describes results and shows an understanding of the technology).

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