Resume Review

Mooseboost

It has been a long time since I have had to write a resume. All the positions I have held in the past have either been through family (Mom and pop shop) or I was a shoe-in through a friend. Now that I am venturing out I will have to focus more on my resume. I have never really written a resume before.

I am looking for a entry/junior position or something in a NOC. Basically, I am looking to move up to the next step after help desk. One of the question I have is: In between PC tech and my help desk job I had a non-IT position for a little while. Should I list it? Currently I only have my relevant experiences listed.

Any advice is appreciated. I know my resume is far from good. Should I put my linked in profile or any other information like that in there? I know I am not looking for a higher position but I still want to have a good resume. Should I put certification logos or is the certification field enough? If I am looking to attend community college should I put that on there? I also work my home lab (6 SW, 6 Router) , is that enough of a note to put there? I have heard of including any things that I volunteer for, but most of those are not tech related.

This is only the rough draft. I want to clean it up and enhance it before I start putting it out. I know well done resumes get interviews.

Mr. Meeseeks

Mooseboost wrote: »

It has been a long time since I have had to write a resume. All the positions I have held in the past have either been through family (Mom and pop shop) or I was a shoe-in through a friend. Now that I am venturing out I will have to focus more on my resume. I have never really written a resume before.

I am looking for a entry/junior position or something in a NOC. Basically, I am looking to move up to the next step after help desk. One of the question I have is: In between PC tech and my help desk job I had a non-IT position for a little while. Should I list it? Currently I only have my relevant experiences listed.

Any advice is appreciated. I know my resume is far from good. Should I put my linked in profile or any other information like that in there? I know I am not looking for a higher position but I still want to have a good resume. Should I put certification logos or is the certification field enough? If I am looking to attend community college should I put that on there? I also work my home lab (6 SW, 6 Router) , is that enough of a note to put there? I have heard of including any things that I volunteer for, but most of those are not tech related.

This is only the rough draft. I want to clean it up and enhance it before I start putting it out. I know well done resumes get interviews.

Resume is easy to look at, I'll give you that.

1. I would rearrange the bullet points so they flow better. For example: "First call resolution....." before "Escalates tickets...."

2. I don't really like the Skills section. Networking? What exactly are you good at in terms of networking? Physically running cable? Configuring VLANs? And so on. Either should be more descriptive or I would take it out.

So long as your non-IT job wasn't "Professional Gambler", I would add it. Guaranteed you will be asked about the gap in employment history. Better to not risk being passed over considering you have only been at your current job since January.

srabiee

To answer your questions:

1) I agree with Mr. M, you should be careful about gaps in your work experience. This is generally frowned upon and you will be asked about it during the interview. Best to include all recent work experience and avoid gaps if possible.

2) If your LinkedIn profile is well designed, informative, and includes professional recommendations, then you can/should include it.

3) Certifications logos are a no-no. They are gaudy and serve no real purpose.

4) Include the university degree info only after your official start date (only after you are attending classes). At that point you would also include your anticipated graduation date.

5) Home lab experience is a little more tricky. Because you have several years of professional IT experience, I would probably recommend leaving it off, and discuss it during the interview instead.

6) IT-related volunteer work should most likely be included.

Regarding your resume, here's what I would recommend:

The professional summary needs some work. It should be a little more lengthy than this (at least 3 or 4 informative sentences). Also, "high-energy" is not a good term to begin your resume, IMO. I will link you to some good information and examples on how to write this section. Google is also a good resource on this.

Regarding the Skills section, instead of listing a bunch of software, technologies, and/or protocols, I would rather see you expand upon this information and explain HOW you are proficient in these skills, especially in a business/enterprise environment. Ideally I would recommend that you incorporate this info into your professional experience, and then drop the skills section altogether. As it stands, this section tells me virtually nothing about your actual skills and capabilities.

Also, drop the term "solution-oriented" and other similar terminology They are meaningless and too many people use such terms on their resumes when they really have nothing to say. There are many good articles on the web that discuss this topic in detail.

Within the professional experience section, each job description should begin with a high-level overview of your daily duties and responsibilities, and then use bullets to highlight special achievements, projects, promotions, etc. Don't rely solely on bullets like this. I will link you to a resume that's a great example on how to format and write this properly. I would recommend expanding on your experience as much as possible, especially as it relates to the specific job that you are applying for.

Your former job description should be completely written in the past tense. I personally also write my current position in past tense as well to make everything consistent, but that's a personal preference. Present or past tense would work for current position.

Each bullet should begin with an action verb. Vary your language and write as academically as possible. I will link you to a huge list of action verbs for you to refer to. Also, the thesaurus is your best friend.

I mentioned it before, but it begs repeating: You should expand on your experience as much as possible. You spent 5.5 years at the PC Technician position but only have 3 brief bullets to say about it. Try to brainstorm and flesh this section out in a bit more detail. Also, try to be more specific with the software, hardware, technologies, etc that you worked with during that time. Don't forget to include projects, promotions, etc. The same goes for your current position as well. Regarding writing in detail, refer to ptilsen's resume below. Also, check out the documentation regarding the STAR method (Situation/Task/Action/Results).

Once you begin college, drop the high school information. I also agree that you should only list the year that you graduated high school. Ideally though, you will remove all references to high school once you become a college student.

You have a section titled "Certifications" and then directly under that you have a sub-heading titled "Certification." Lose the sub-heading.

This is an excellent resume guide with example resumes, a huge list of action verbs, sample summaries, etc:

http://www.filedropper.com/resumeguide

This thread contains a fantastic example of a properly formatted and written resume (ptilsen's resume):

Resume time

Someone recently uploaded this document regarding the "STAR Method" of writing resume content. You may want to take a look at it and see if it helps you.

http://www.filedropper.com/starmethod

Mooseboost

Thanks for the replies guys! That is definitely a lot of good information! I really do appreciate it. Sitting down to make that original draft I felt really lost. I poked around online and found a lot of resume examples but there was such a wide variety it was hard for me to pick out what was good and what was trash - so I tried to go as simple as I could.

@srabiee - Thank you so much for those links.


Now to get to revising it so I can get it out.

Mooseboost

Updated to revision 2. This is by far not the final product. I need to work on the wording a lot more but I think this is better then the original.

I have a friend who is an English professor who has agreed to sit down with me and help me word smith a little bit better than I could on my own. I know I really need to work on the job descriptions. I know what I want to say, just don't know how to write it down. Isn't that funny? You could describe something in person and but when it comes to putting it on paper it is much more difficult.

srabiee

You definitely need to keep this resume at a single page. Lots of wasted white space, so it shouldn't be difficult to consolidate that down.

If necessary, you can expand to two pages in the future after you get more work experience, education, and certifications under your belt.

Mooseboost

Lesson one: Learn how to work the editor you are using. Was a hassle to get everything formatted because I had no clue what I was doing.

I did manage to get it down to one page. My fear is that now it looks too crowded, which is why I originally had everything on two pages. Is it better or be crowded or have white space?

srabiee

I don't think it looks all that crowded overall. If you are concerned about it, remove the border around the page and then reduce the four page margins.

Mooseboost

I wasn't sure what defines crowded vs not crowded. As long as it looks OK I will leave the format as it is and continue to work on the wording. I really appreciate your help!

Mr. Meeseeks

Current formatting I think looks pretty good!

goatama

One thing that may help - making sure your acronyms are correct: ADLS2+ and VDLS2? Do you mean ADSL2+ and VDSL2? I can tell you that an automated system looking for those keywords doesn't usually figure in typos. And a live person who knows what it's supposed to be might not be too confident that you know what you're talking about if you don't have it correct.