Resume Help

Disgruntled3lf

So I'm looking to sharpen my resume. Advice appreciated.

srabiee

Your resume should begin with a professional summary. I will link you to a good example of a professional summary at the bottom of this post.

The education section and certifications section should not be separated like this. The professional summary should be followed by the education section, and then the certification section should be listed below that.

I like that you began each job description with a high-level overview, and then used bullet points to highlight your special achievements. I also like how you began each bullet point with an action verb. Good work!

I would recommend deleting the "Achievements/Highlights" title from each job description. It's visually distracting, IMO. Just begin with the high-level overview and then immediately follow with the bullet points.

I would recommend capitalizing the first word of each bullet point. Listing them lowercase like that looks like a grammatical error at first glance.

Refer to ptilsen's resume for an example of excellent formatting, wording, etc.

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

I'd like to see how this resume turns out after you make some of those corrections/modifications. I should be able to give you some further advice at that point.

Disgruntled3lf

Ok. I'll make some changes. I listed Certs/Exp/Edu in that order because I felt that that was the order of strength so to speak and I felt the ~4years of experience was stronger than most of a BS. But I can see why you'd put them together too.

Disgruntled3lf

Ok. I've made the changes you suggested. Updated Resume2-1-San.pdf

srabiee

"Innovative system administrator with over 4 years of progressive..."

The second sentence doesn't read well. You should rework this to say something like: "Extensive experience in deploying, configuring, and maintaining Microsoft and Linux operating systems in an enterprise environment."

I would use separate bullets for the LPIC-1 cert and the Linux+ cert.

I would recommend listing your education before your certs. A bachelors degree holds more value than your certs. (even if you haven't graduated yet, I would still list it first)

In your job descriptions, refrain from beginning sentences with the word "hired." The reader already knows you were hired for that position, naturally. Instead of saying "Hired to provide support..." you should say "Provided support..."

There are some instances where you can expand on your job experience as far as technical skills and proficiencies go. For example, there's a bullet point on your most recent position that says "Improved hardware footprint by virtualizing server and network resources." That's definitely an accomplishment that you want to list, but you haven't told me what technologies, software, platform, hardware, etc that you used to facilitate this. Did you use ESXi on Dell PowerEdge servers, or Hyper-V on HP Proliant servers, etc? Try to expand on your resume in this manner to really make your experience and accomplishments shine, as well as inform the reader of your knowledge and proficiencies.

"Recovered GreatPlains (Microsoft Dynamics) data after multiple drive failures." How about rewording this to draw more attention to the severity of the issue and to your accomplishment? Something like: "Executed emergency disaster recovery measures in order to successfully avert data loss due to multiple drive failures."

I would recommend that you go through sentence by sentence in this manner and try to expand on your info as much as possible, as well as work on making the resume sound as academic as possible. I like using the thesaurus when working on my own resume.

Disgruntled3lf

Ok, I've bowed to your persistence and moved education to the top. I've also made the other changes you suggested and went through with a thesaurus. I think it looks pretty good. What do you think? Resume2-2-San.pdf

srabiee

It's looking good. There's still a few issues here and there with certain sentences.

"Persuaded management to adopt, and deployed, a more robust inventory system."

Did you have more involvement in this process beyond simply persuading someone to implement this? If so, I would elaborate and clarify your involvement. Something like "Assisted management in designing and implementing inventory system resiliency." It really just comes down to what your actual involvement was. Ideally you don't want to state on your resume that you simply persuaded someone to do something and then that was the extent of your involvement. That isn't technical, so to speak. I'm sure you can come up with something to fix this.

"Increased efficiency by re-ordering tasks." What tasks? How did you reorder them? This tells me nothing.

"Maintained 100% record accountability." Can you expand on this? Again, almost tells me nothing.

"Convinced management to adopt an off-site backup solution." Again, was that the extent of your involvement? Please expand on any technical roles that you provided during this process.

"Hired to maintain an inventory, in Microsoft Excel, of on-site client records." Lose the "hired" part. Also, the commas are unnecessary. "Maintained an extensive inventory of on-site client records utilizing Microsoft Excel."

Still needs some work, but it's definitely coming along.

Disgruntled3lf

Ok, I fixed the last "Hired to". Removed "Maintained 100% record accountability." Because to expand on that and explain why it was impressive I'd need to explain what a mess my predecessor left and how bad the VP managing it was and that's not resume stuff. Expounded on the off-site backup. As far as the re-ordering of tasks goes. I can expound on it but it would take a paragraph. Basically when I became lead they were all doing each task (everyone preps, everyone indexes, etc). I arranged it into an assembly line like system based on what each person was best at. This let me cut down on hardware and since my employees were now "specialized" they got a little faster just because they gained more familiarity with their task. And since the project is still running 3 years later that "little" faster has added up. So I don't know that it is inherently technical but it shows an ability to think logically and manage projects. Latest revision Resume2-3-San.pdf

srabiee

You don't have to write a paragraph to expand on those accomplishments. "Developed a system to efficiently delegate tasks to team members, increasing productivity and decreasing company costs."

I think the resume looks ok. Let's see if the other forum members have any further input to give you.

Disgruntled3lf

I've reworded that sentence. I'd like to thank you for all of your help.