Resume Advice for IT Job Seekers

Looking for work or would like a new gig in technology?

Too often the resume for the technologist is a grocery list of skills, certifications and acronyms. What about your impact on the business, a project or a team?

As told in the article Searching for an IT Job: The Do’s and Don’ts:

“Applicants “tend to have all the technical lingo and that they’ve been exposed to this and that, but they don’t talk about their experiences,” says Frank Cullen, president of The Cullen Group, a career management firm based in Boston. “They talk about programs they’ve worked with rather than the real value they will bring to the company.”Another mistake is having a resume that is too brief. Making your resume fit into one page doesn’t work in the IT industry, maintains Kingsley Tagbo, an IT career coach with IT Career Boot Camp by Exacticity Inc.”You have to get into detail about your technical skills, since people are looking for skill sets and will compare your resume to someone else’s,” says Tagbo, in O’Sallon, Mo. IT is a “skills-crazy industry” and “The person who details every skill for a software developer’s position, will get more notice because of the relevant detail being provided.”“

IT is a skills industry, so you have to document skills. But only showing skills may not be enough to get you a call back these days. Today’s hiring managers, recruiters and job coaches are going to tell you to dig a lot deeper than your credentials to show them how you impacted the bottom line throughout your work experience.

Other resume advice from the article:

-Improve your resume summary by “using the right adjectives and capturing what’s special about [you] that a prospective employer needs to know. Summaries are often dry and factual.”

-If you’re an expert in something, say it. If not, say “extensive experience.”

-Less on responsibility, more on results:

“For example, a resume might say the candidate designed a business intelligence system and developed code and did an implementation.”If I’m working with someone, I try to put in a smaller section of responsibilities, then underneath that, a bulleted list with accomplishments.” That way, he [Mario DiCioccio, an executive and personal coach] says, you’re focusing more on the business results–did the project come in and on time? Did you save the company money? There are results that saved the company money because of your work, he says.“

Once again, it’s what you’ve done, how you did it and what happened when you did that matters.