Resume Help

elderkai

Hey, everyone --


I'm about a year and a half into my current job and things are going pretty well. I've gotten a lot further skill-wise than before I started, which is great, but I can feel that I'm not getting challenged as much anymore. I'm certainly going to ask for more challenging projects, but its just that there's not always those going on. Since it needs done anyway, I'd like to ask for some opinions on my resume.

I've attached a sanitized version of my resume in the post. I'm fairly comfortable with my summary, though I could always use advice, but what needs surgical repair is my technical background. I seem to be very bad at wording my technical history on a resume.

Do I talk about responsibilities like "Responsible for configuring X and Y" or talk about projects. What if a lot of projects are all very similar so none really stand out? How can I craft that into my "story"? That's really what I'm bad at. Reading my work history has no story of what I can do.



Codey_Oxley_Resume_Sanitized.pdf

elderkai

Lost cause, huh? :P

Essendon

I have a few spare minutes, so here goes:

- Summary is faaaaar too long. The first paragraph is long enough, there's no need to go on and on really. The 2nd and 3rd paragraphs are cover letter material.

- Starting a paragraph with "Is" is odd, never seen that before. Some punctuations are not needed. See how you have a comma after "Well, versed.." Not needed. Check elsewhere too, you want to be spot-on with your resume. To me, how well you do you resume and how much attention you pay to little things tells me how you will perform your job.

- You say you are "Well versed" in *nix, but I dont see anything to confirm you have experience in it (apart from being able to write a script).

- I find myself saying this faaar too often, put a little meat on the bones. Your current job's experience is presented kinda okay, but you could do better. You've worked on over 1000 customer devices - what were they? computers/modems/Nexus/whiteboards? j/k, but tell me what you worked on. Things like this make the hiring manager want to pick up the phone (or not!) and call you in for an interview.

- You overcame routing challenges, this sounds like an accomplishment to me. I'd like to know more about it. Tell me more! Perhaps create a 2-3 line accomplishment paragraph under each job's bullet points and blow my socks off.

So, consolidate the summary. Write something that's impressive - something like Accomplished Network Engineer with x years of experience, specializing in designing, implementing and supporting large networks with multi-vendor devices blah blah. Well versed in several scripting languages, BASH, python, etc etc.

Hope this helps!

PS I'd like to see an improved version too, makes my effort worthwhile!

elderkai

Thanks! I'll definitely flesh out my history more with accomplishments vs. facts and trim out majority of the summary. Guess I need to shape my story from work history and less by summary.


EDIT: What about writing down experience that comes from labbing? Real-world labs that you've spent hours in, but not necessarily for work. For learning specific technologies to know where appropriate in your job?

Polynomial

elderkai wrote: »

What about writing down experience that comes from labbing? Real-world labs that you've spent hours in, but not necessarily for work. For learning specific technologies to know where appropriate in your job?

Interview talking points.

elderkai

Good point. I'm going to take tomorrow and try to really revise my experience. I've basically wiped everything clean. Will come back with results.

AverageJoe

Essendon gave a good overview, and I agree with the comments made. I'll stress the "Well, versed" comma, though. It's not just unnecessary; it's wrong. The lowercased "c" in certified (second word in the pro summary) too. "Deployed over 40..." is the only bullet that wasn't ended with a period, so either inconsistent or missing attention to detail. For me, those would be a major distraction and probably send your resume to the "probably not" pile. "Touched base with IPSec"... touched base? I guess I don't know what that means in this context.

Education is unclear to me. Did you graduate from those programs? Were they related to your career? I have no idea what a collaborative program or the Ben Franklin C&T school does. Did you have a focus or area of expertise? Academic accomplishments? As a potential employer, why do I care about these programs? If they were IT related or connected somehow, like courses in writing that will help on the job or in pursuit of a degree you're still working on, say so. If they were completely unrelated, like courses in HVAC repair or plumbing, I think I'd remove unless you're trying to demonstrate you're a successful career switcher. If that's the case then I'd expect to see a hint of that in the summary and/or previous jobs sections.

Overall, I think it's a pretty decent resume, but there's potential to make it better.

Just my 2 cents. Good luck!
Joe