Resume Advice / Critique

Hi everyone,

I'm just hoping to receive some feedback on my resume. I used to work in finance before deciding to leave the field in October to pursue a career transition into IT. Right now I am looking for an entry level position at the Help Desk, in Network Administration and in Security Administration.Any comments provided are helpful. It has been a struggle so far as I can't seem to get interviews for entry level roles that require experience and when I finally get an interview for a job that doesn't require much prior technical knowledge, things don't pan out for one reason or another (most recently, I was told that I was "too well polished" and the position was "beneath me"...when in actuality I badly wanted the job to help build my hard skills).

Thanks in advance!

MyName_Resume_Critique.doc

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Comments

j86cici

Bump

ptilsen

At first glance it's very good, and generally not a bad format. However, when I read into your experience I don't see much that interests me. It's good to show your experience, but your resume is ~70% experience and the vast majority of it is not pertinent to IT. Don't get me wrong, a background in finance is not a bad way to get into IT at all. But it's a lot of text and not a lot of focus on your IT skills.

I love the professional summary, and I think this is where IT resumes need to go. However, I would like to see a section heading for it, just like the others. It is a bit too long as well. I would drop the last sentence entirely, and maybe see about shortening it up a line.

Since your experience is largely not pertinent to IT, but still valuable, I would say trim each one up at least a line, maybe two. A format that I really prefer and use myself it to describe each position in 1-3 sentences, then bullet point major accomplishments. Again, with your experience being valuable, but not IT-related, I would say use this format, and limit yourself to two bullet points per job.

I would take of the "Professional & Community Affiliations". Consider a different font, maybe Calibri or Tahoma, and perhaps larger as well. Again, without highly pertinent experience you're going to want a shorter resume, and that does mean bigger fonts and less content, as it should.

I would like to see "Areas of Strength" transformed into a skills section. You can keep some of your specifics from your finance career in there, but you have to have some technical skills. I love to see the business acumen and polish in an IT professional, but at the end of the day I don't see that you have the skills to fix even basic PC problems, which means I'm not going to hire you. Network+ and Security+ give me some idea, but not enough to gauge your skill level.

Actually, as I look at dates, it really doesn't make any sense to keep the two older jobs on the resume with any depth, if at all. Their short-term finance internships. Maybe they were valuable in your personal development, but they don't really add much value to you as a prospective IT professional. If you do keep them, limit the descriptions to two sentences and one bullet point each.

Anyway, the reality is your resume is not bad and you should get hired for a helpdesk position, easily. A+ would help since that's a more common request than Net+ and Sec+, but it's not necessarily a requirement, either. You are going to get disregarded by some jobs asking for experience, and others will indeed think you're too good. The former will probably be too hard and the latter will probably not pay well or offer good opportunities for growth, so you're not necessarily losing out.