Resumes

This page is a work in progress! Do not use (yet).

Would you be willing to look over my resume?

This is probably the question you asked me before I sent you this wiki page! I am happy to look over your resume, but I request that you look over this page first. This page contains all general suggestions I will make and I highly recommend that you implement as many of these suggestions that make sense to you as possible. After you make changes, you are welcome to give me your updated resume and I will give you personalized feedback.

If you have any questions at all, please ask me - this is to help you! I want you to get that interview as much as you do!

Purpose

The purpose of a resume may seem obvious - to get a job, right? Sort of. The purpose of a resume is to get a specific type of job. I assume, if you've reached out to me, that you're not looking to get just any job. I know when I graduated university, I wanted to get a job that used my newest degree. While there is nothing wrong with working retail or in food service, that's not what my goal, and therefore the purpose of my resume, was.

Additionally, after I finished graduate school, I realized that I had two potential career paths: using my new degree to become an Instructional Designer and continuing as a Senior Software Engineer. Since each path required me to highlight specific and mostly mutually exclusive skills, I ended up with two resumes.

If you have multiple career paths in your resume, I highly recommend considering creating multiple resumes. For your first walkthrough of this wiki page, pick one career. It can be the one you have the most experience with or the one you want to work in the most - either is fine. If there are multiple titles for the same type of position (Software Engineer, Software Developer, Programmer, etc) or are closely related (Instructional Designer, Curriculum Developer, etc), you do not have to break them out into separate resumes since what you highlight for each position title will be the same. If you are unsure if there will be enough overlap, pick one title for now and see at the end if it makes sense to include additional titles with the resume.

Complete the following statement:
The purpose of this resume is to get a position as a ____________________________________.

General Format

I recommend you start with the following sections:

• Contact
• Objective
• Work Experience
• Education
• Skills
• Other Relevant Experience

This is how we will start grouping information to put on the resume. We will refine these sections as we start putting information into them.

Contact

How can someone who wants to interview you contact you?

Here are some options:

• Phone number
  • Only include if you will answer! I don't include my phone number because I almost never answer unknown numbers, so phone is probably the worst way to contact me, besides smoke signals (carrier pigeon would probably work though)
  • You may also make a note of hours ("between 9 and 5 [your local time zone] only") or how to use to use your number ("call only", "text only", "call or text")
  • If you include your phone number, make sure your voicemail message is professional and your responses to unknown numbers is professional
• Email address
  • Only include if you check your email regularly!
  • Make sure your email address is professional - no "hotgurl09" or "feralboi77" (apologies to "hotgurl09" and "feralboi77", if you're out there, for being my example)
  • If you need a new email address, you can get a new one for free with gmail.com or proton.me (if you're not a fan of Google)
• Social media
  • Only include professional accounts - you definitely do not want to link your personal Instagram or Twitter/X - LinkedIn is a popular one to include
  • Only include if you update regularly - your functionally blank LinkedIn is not worth linking to
• Online portfolios
  • Your professional website is a good one here
  • So are curated ones, like GitHub or GitLab for coding and Dribbble for design
  • Again, only include these if you update regularly - your required GitHub from that one course is only worth linking to if it a) was recently created or b) continued to be used after the course ended

Objective

What are you looking for?

Work Experience

What practical experience do you have that is relevant to your objective?

For each position you've held, gather the following information:

• Employer
  • If you are a contractor through a recruiting company like RobertHalf or TekSystems, include the company you did the work for, not the RobertHalf or TekSystems
• Title
  • The official title you held - if you received a title change, such as through a promotion, you may want to consider that a separate "position"
• Position type
  • Full Time, Part Time, Contract
• Position location
  • Where you worked - City, State is fine, include country if outside your current country
  • Include "Remote" if you were fully remote
• Start date
  • Month and year is fine
• End date
  • Month and year is fine, "Present" works if you're still there
• Responsibilities
  • Bullet points about what you did - don't worry about wording at this point, just write down everything that you did (even if it's a lot - we can pare it down later)

If you do not have work experience relevant to your objective, you may consider including experience that:

• Shows you have worked in a professional setting (if you're switching careers)
  • All your previous experience from your previous career can be included here
• Shows you can be put in a position of responsibility an extended period of time (if you're just entering the workforce)
  • Volunteer work
  • Informal gigs like baby-sitting
  • That one time you flipped burgers over the summer

Education

What education do you have that is relevant to your objective?

For each degree you've earned, gather the following information:

• Institution
  • University, college, or other organization name
• Institution location
  • Where the institution is located - City, State is fine, include country if outside your current country
  • Include "Remote" if you were fully remote
• Degree type
  • High school diploma, GED, BS/BA, MS/MA/MFA/MBA/etc, certification
• Degree name
• Start date
  • When did you start earning this degree at this institution
  • Month and year is fine
• End date
  • When did/do you complete this degree
  • Month and year is fine, can add "(Expected)" to the end date if you haven't completed it yet
• Relevant coursework
  • If you have little to no work experience
• Relevant activities
  • Honors societies, professional fraternities/sororities, clubs, competitions, conferences, etc you were a part of through or because of this institution

Skills

What skills (soft or hard) do you have that are relevant to your objective?

Hard skills are things like:

• Technology you can use (programming languages, common desktop software for this position, web applications for this position, etc)
• Formal processes you are familiar working with (project management, triage, thinking frameworks, etc)
• Anything else that can be formally measured

Soft skills are things like:

• Collaboration skills
• Communication skills
• Independency
• Anything you excel at that would make you a good employee or colleague

Other Relevant Experience

What other experience do you have that is relevant to your objective?

This is your catch-all - anything that hasn't been documented in the previous sections that you think an employer might be interested, such as:

• Professional societies
• Special interest groups
• Mentoring
• Volunteer work

In the past, people have suggested including things that make you a well rounded person like charities you support or hobbies of yours. My opinion is that these are unnecessary and feel like resume fluff/filler - if it doesn't even remotely showcase your ability to do the position you're applying for, don't include it.

Refining

Now that we have the general content for each section, let's start refining some of these sections.