As the global recession starts to fade away, IT Leaders who are searching for a new job are starting to feel some new hope and IT Leaders who still have jobs are starting to get the itch to take a look around at what other opportunities there might be out there. Sounds like it’s time to get some resumes in order…
Overall Format
A quick search of the Internet will reveal suggestions for a large number of different formats for resumes: classic, modern, etc. What is the right format for you? Sure, if you are applying to a progressive firm, a novel formatted resume might be eye catching, but since you can never tell what they are really looking for I’m going to suggest that you stick with the classic format.
This means that you should start out with your contact information and follow it up with a summary statement. After this you should list out your career in reverse chronological order (what you’ve done most recently is always the most interesting). Each job needs to be described by a list of bullet points. Wrap things up by listing your educational accomplishments.
Things That Need To Be In Your Resume
Ok, so clearly your resume needs to be both well-organized and easy to read. The person who will be reading it will probably be moving quickly and if your resume is hard to read, they won’t read it. Depending on how long you’ve been working, a three page resume is just fine – you’ve probably done a lot and so there’s a lot for you to document.
We live in a world where more often than not resumes now get scanned by computers before a human ever lays eyes on them. What this means is you’ve got to write your resume in such a way that a computer can process it correctly. This means that you’ve got to load it with keywords that recruiters would be using when searching for candidates. You can figure out what these keywords are by taking a look at job descriptions for the types of jobs that you are looking for – work the words used to describe the job into your resume.
In the world of IT we use a lot of acronyms to describe technologies and certifications. Feel free to include the acronyms in your resume, but make sure that you also spell them out at least once.
Three Things To Avoid
It’s all too easy to get caught up in worrying about what font to use and how to cram everything that you’ve done into as small of a space as possible. However, spending too much time on things that don’t matter can easily let an IT Leader skip over three things that are important. Here they are:
- Include Enough Detail: As we cut and trim the descriptions of what we’ve done in the past, we can accidently cut out too much information. You should view your resume as telling a story about how you’ve advanced in your career. The goal is to show a prospective employer that you have the ability to grow in any role. Make sure that your resume has enough details about what you’ve done in each position.
- Don’t Be Ambiguous: The older an IT Leader gets, the more likely it is that we’ll start to fudge some of the information contained in our resume. Leaving off dates such as when we graduated from college is a common technique in order to obscure our age. Don’t do it, if the company decided to hire you they’ll verify your degree(s) and so you should include graduation dates to begin with.
- Grammar Counts: Those squiggly red lines and green lines that show up as you are typing up your resume in Microsoft Word really do mean something. No matter how impressive your past accomplishments are, if your resume is littered with misspelled words or poorly constructed sentences then that will take away from how you are perceived.
What All Of This Means For You
In this age of Internet everything, IT Leaders might think that all that it will take to get their next job is to have an account on every social networking site out there. It turns out that the old standby, your resume, is still an important communication tool.
Not only does it matter what work experiences you’ve had, but how you structure your resume and what information you put in it are what will make it work for you. Make sure that you include the essential details about your past jobs, eliminate any ambiguous information, and make sure that there are no spelling or grammatical errors.
Every job that you apply for ends up being a competition between you and other candidates. In order to give yourself the best possible advantage, you need to make sure that your resume does a good job of clearly telling your story. Follow these suggestions and you’ll be well on your way…
Do you think that it is worth while including old languages and skills on your resume (COBOL, Fortran, etc.)?
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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
Things are tough all over. If you were counting on getting a promotion this year, you might want to scale your hopes back just a bit. A lot of IT Leaders are discovering that their career plans are having to be put on hold. Maybe we should spend some time talking about what you should do now…
