Resume Critique

Cold Titanium

I've applied to about 5-6 various security positions with no response. I'd appreciate a critique of my resume.

resume-review.pdf

Thanks

Akaricloud

Could definitely use some work. I don't have all that much time but I'll point out the major flaws I see right off the bat in no particular order.

1. Certifications is under your skills section. Seems a bit strange to me. A certifications section would be more important than your skills section to be honest.
2. What is Microsoft 70-680? Do you expect a recruiter is going to know each individual MS exam by number?
3. Your objective starts with "My objective". Seems redundant being under the objective heading. Also I'm not sure what "expand in knowledge" is supposed to mean.
4. Your use of months and then sometimes summer is confusing. Stick with actual month/year dates consistently.
5. Your employment history heading doesn't appear the same as the rest. The ______ line comes out at the top vs the middle like the rest. Again consistency counts.
6. Your employment history really draws attention to where you worked and not what position you were in. Consider reformatting these.
7. Your actual job bullet points are weak, especially for your current position. These change tense, change format and really leave me confused as to what you do/did. This is probably what is killing you most and likely needs to be completely redone.

Overall I'd suggest you get rid of the skills section and re-format your work experience to better demonstrate how you used these skills to bring value to the positions you've had.

Cold Titanium

Thank you for looking at it. I've made some changes based on your feedback.

resume-review-v2.pdf

How's this?

Akaricloud

Getting better! I would still try to bring some more of your skillset back into your work experience.

The things that instantly jump out at me now:

1. In your current position you're responsible for everything but that says nothing to what you actually do or have accomplished.
2. You sometimes use periods at the end of these bullets and sometimes not.
3. In your second job does "Server08" refer to something specifically or are you talking about Microsoft Windows Server 2008?
4. Your spacing between sections isn't consistent.
5. Your bullets don't have the same indenting between sections.

I personally would expand your certifications section a bit to draw more attention to them. Instead of just a bulleted list you could expand this to include dates and vendor for each. Also if you can try to show what value a couple specific projects brought to each company it would help a lot.

emerald_octane

Margins need help which can be done by thickening up the job history.

Experience section is tough to read. I don't need to know what you did, I want to know what you accomplished and why you were working on whatever it was you were working on. So you worked on Cisco phones? Did you achieve 99.999% uptime without a stated SLA? Did you optimize the provisioning process to reduce the amount of time it takes to issue new equipment to end users? Everything in the first job could be squished into one line IMO. "Responsible for supporting Cisco based VoIP, routing, switching, and security technologies." Done. If you need specific platforms for keywords or whatever, throw those in there. "Responsible for basic Cisco ASA administration, reducing attack surface of DMZ Servers to specific ports."

Cold Titanium

Thank you both for the feedback. I've made some more adjustments. I'm not real sure on how to fit in my other skills. I'd like them to know that I do have knowledge of scripting/sec tools etc, but I don't use them in my job. Not all places take a cover letter either letting me explain.

resume-review-v3.pdf

gbdavidx

What is CCNAS? Does the HR dep know what that means? I would personally put CCNA: Security and personally i would stick around at your current position for at least a year

Cold Titanium

You'd think that if they didn't know what the CCNAS is they wouldn't know what the CCNA is either. I guess non-technical people will be reading it though. Well my current position and my last are under the same name just different branches. I could just group them all under a Blah Systems then sub-specify the health place and University.

Reibe

I would...

• Switch the order of your degrees, the more recent BS above the AAS.
• Drop in the 'In Progress' OSCP. If you are middle of a course of what not, possibly add in a "Significant Courses" section under education to include it. If it is self study, just leave it off.
• Change the order to Employment History, Education, Certs. Putting you education first makes that the focus instead of your established work history.
• Change CCNAS to CCNA Security. CCNA is well known and has been around for years and the specializations are still relatively unknown to most people unless they keep their eyes on certifications; which depends on which side of the philosophy fence the interviewer(s) fall on.
• Change all the employment history statements to past tense.
• If you led a Wireless update project, did you supervise or lead a team? How many?
• Change "Oct 2010" to "Oct. 2010".The appearance of the short time span on your current job is also worrying.

Add more detail to the work history, especially your most recent job.

• Do you have specific model families for hardware you worked on? 3750, 2960, 6500?
• "Support Cisco based VoIP", is this CUCM? CME? Unity? H323 gateways?
• Quantities? (ex. 23 Access closets, 140+ Cisco IP Phones, etc)
• More wireless info, AP and Controller Quantities, possibly a hint to the complexity of the setup? (ex. "Setup a WLC 5500 HA cluster to provide wireless services including dynamic vlan assignments and a BYOD captive portal. Led team of 3 to deploy 200 LWAPs.)
• Were you solely responsible for anything? Do you have any metrics worth reporting?