Resumes 1.2

IT Resume Tips, Part Trois

Professional Experience

This is the section in your resume where you give full and factual disclosure of responsibilities and accomplishments in your career.

It is of ultimate importance that you consider the work load of the reader when you are making decisions about the format of this section – if understanding your resume is a chore, it can be deleted with one click. This is not an industry where unusual resume creativity buys the candidate favor.

It’s been my experience that IT hiring managers prefer the reverse chronological format for this section. Simple, classic, and easy for a busy person to follow. For each assignment, show a header and then list relevant bullet points.

There are 3 bits of data that must be included in the assignment header:

• Company (this is the client name if you were a consultant) and location
• Beginning and ending dates (month and year, month and year, MONTH AND year)
• Functional title (not the official HR title for your position, but a common description for what you actually did – you may want to customize this for each job opportunity)

The more effective resumes show digestible bullet points of action items. "Gathered" "Wrote" "Analyzed" "Developed" "Tested" "Documented". These bullets should tell things you accomplished during your tenure – actions that you performed. In these days of metrics overload, it’s likely that you have statistics and dollar amounts and time savings and other quantifications you can include in these bullet points to prove your value – include them. If you were a PM or a Team Lead include the number of people reporting to you.

Education Section

In this section you will include your educational accomplishments – use bullet points. If you’ve been out of college more than two years, your employer doesn’t care what your GPA was – leave it off. If you’ve been out of college more than 5 years, leave the dates off. Certifications that you didn’t include in the Technical Summary section should be listed here. Simple.

Next time, general resume tips.