Having troubles going to the next step.. Sys Admin

jahaziel

After searching for a new job month or two after my "dream job". I keep getting the same answer of I'm looking for someone with more experience. I do land some interviews but not for the job I'm looking for.. I'll attach my resume in order to have people look at it.. My real question is.. How can I put my experience of setting up failover clusters or anything I have running in a lab but "Production environment"? I host my web site that i'll be using for my blog and own private owncloud storage solution. Also, Host DC with DNS and DHCP services. I honestly am on a breaking point.. any help would be appreciated. Can I add all those skills to the skills portion of my resume?Edit: Updated resume a bit..

linuxabuser

Your font is different throughout your resume. It's also apparent that English is your second language.

W Stewart

I don't see why not. Just make sure to be clear that it's lab experience. All the potential employer wants to know is that you're familiar with the technology and that you'll be able to adapt quickly in their environment. If I went by what I did on paper at my last job as a jr admin I wouldn't be qualified to do anything but replace hardware and monitor servers in nagios but because I labbed and displayed the knowledge I gained independent of my last position, I'm now implementing high availability clusters, puppet configuration management, central logging, scripting, web coding and a bunch of other stuff that my current employer didn't even know I could do. The only real difference between production and labbing is that you have to have a more cautious mind set with the understanding that you can't just start over from scratch and a mistake could affect the entire business. How you actually got your understanding of that technology isn't as important as whether or not you've developed that mind set.

jahaziel

linuxabuser wrote: »

Your font is different throughout your resume. It's also apparent that English is your second language.

English is actually my first language..

If possible, can you tell me what you saw wrong?

@W Stewart Thanks for your advice. I always feel wrong putting stuff on my resume that I have labbed. I'll take a second look at my resume and add everything I have learned.

W Stewart

If you know it pretty well then put it on there and just be sure to let the employer know that it's something you messed around with independently. You'd be doing yourself and your employer a dis service if you pretended that you didn't know something that would be useful for you to know.

srabiee

Your resume should begin with a professional summary section.

Within the education section, you should list your BS degree above the AAS degree. (always list the highest level degrees first. this also applies to certifications)

Your skills section can be incorporated into the professional summary and then deleted if you wish to save on resume space. I recommend that you do this.

Within the experience section, each job position should begin with a high-level overview of your daily duties and responsibilities as well as commonly used technologies. Then use a few bullet points to highlight projects, special accomplishments, achievements/promotions, etc. Don't rely solely on bullet points like this.

As someone else mentioned, there are font consistency issues.

Make sure that you use an equal amount of white space throughout the resume so that certain sections an paragraphs aren't crammed together.

Once you make some changes and are ready to re-upload your resume, I recommend that you save/convert it to pdf format. That way every viewer sees the exact same format when viewing the resume.

For a fantastic reference resume, I highly recommend that you take a look at ptilsen's resume. It doesn't get much better than his:

http://www.techexams.net/forums/jobs-degrees/91333-resume-time.html

I'm no resume expert by any means, but I spent a lot of time and energy on mine, and had some good help with it. If you want to take a look at mine, it's posted in this thread:

http://www.techexams.net/forums/jobs-degrees/104429-resume-critique-advice-final-draft.html

bridgestone

What is your dream job? From your resume, seems you are already working with servers in a production environment.

jahaziel

Updated resume one more time. Let know what you think.

I do work on servers but its only 10 percent of my job. I was lucky to be put on those projects.

srabiee

I'm still seeing the same resume as before.

Cyberscum

To be honest the format look terrible to me. The resume is riddled with sentence fragments and run on sentences. I don’t think it is your lack of technical experience that is not landing you interviews, it’s the resume.

1.Change the format
2.List things you did above normal work
3.Make sure all punctuation and sentence structure is solid.

Take a look at this sentence in your resume, “Installed printer on 60+ computers at computer lab using printer management on Windows Server 2012 to reduce man-hours installing it one by one.”

The resume has a lot of these errors. PM if you want a my resume template.

jahaziel

Ended up having issues uploading. I fixed the sentence mentioned about installing printers through group policies.

Uploaded. Now i'm worried about the format. Not sure what to do to change it.

@srabiee I hope you don't mind me "stealing" your summary. I liked how you worded everything.

Did alot of changes. Hopefully the format is better and fixed grammar and typos..

linuxabuser

Put your certs at the top without bullet points.

The format is not bad. It isn't spectacular, but it does look like a dozen other resumes I've seen.

lsud00d

The first sentence "Service-focused IT professional with over three years of experience; ranging from..." should be "Service-focused IT professional with over three years of experience, including..." (semicolons are used for trailing independent clauses)

The above grammar error is repeated several times throughout your resume. Colons are used for listing (dependent clause) purposes.

For skills, I recommend listing it as so:

Networking: Configuring Brocade and Cisco routers and switches
Virtualization: VMware ESXi 5.5, Vcenter Server, Hyper-V (what version of Hyper-V?)
Windows OS: 7, 8.1, Server 2008, Server 2012, Server 2012R2 (did you mean to include Server 2008R2?)
Windows Roles/Features: DC, DNS, DHCP, WDS, Failover Clustering

Also, while having concrete numbers is good (upgraded 20+ severs, migrated WDS from DS to stand-alone server, etc) those numbers are somewhat small and you can mask that by removing those numbers. I think the 150 tickets/week and 50+ AP's are fine to leave in.

List the certification completion date and do it in table format, 2 columns.

srabiee

I would expand on the professional summary a bit. A single sentence seems a little short to me. Also, three years of experience isn't a lot, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend mentioning that in the summary. Once you get to 5 or 6 years of experience, I think it would be ok to mention that in that manner.

I was never a fan of a skills section, but that's up to you. I would personally rather see you include that info in your experience and show me how you are proficient in those technologies using complete sentences. It would also save on resume space.

Each job description should include a high-level overview of your daily duties and responsibilities, common tasks, commonly used technologies, etc. Then use the bullet points to highlight special achievements, projects, promotions, etc. It will read much better that way, and looks more professional.

The associates degree lists a city and state, but the bachelors degree doesn't. This is a formatting inconsistency that I recommend fixing.

Under certs, you should include some spacing between the Cisco, Brocade, and CompTIA headings. They are crammed together right now.

Looking good so far.

jahaziel

@srabiee The reason behind my skills section is because unfortunately my current jobs doesn't offer me the opportunity to work on those technologies. It's my way to try and score the job I really want.