Skills For A Resume

Resumes Communicate

Personal and professional ability should always shine brightly above anything else.  It should be a professional portrait.  Truly a self-portrait of YOU. How does one accomplish this?

As mentioned above, resumes are all too often found to focus exclusively upon the writer’s tools-of-trade (nouns) within their bullet points.  In the fiend of Information Technology (IT), talent will commonly punch-up technical terms (nouns) ignoring what is most important.

In addition to technology, job seekers looking for:

• What did you do?
• How did you do it?
• Your actions, doingness and accomplishments

Four (4) out of five (5) resumes can be counted on to be starving of such content. The balance is routinely off.  These starved resumes contain lists detailing their tools-of-trade (nouns).

The following cannot be stressed enough to DTS Inc. consultants and candidates: nouns, as described above, do not provide sufficient context or description for a Healthy Resume.  Your skills and ability are absolutely vital.

If you’ve run into resume-writer’s block, do the following:

1. Write down a full lists of your tools-of-trade.
2. Next, take this list and details what you did with these tools. Describe how you did it.

You might note technical resumes commonly include any all versions of Linux, Windows or Network firewalls, along with other technologies (nouns).  In development, you will undoubtedly discover many resumes replete with impressive repertoires of coding languages.

This is a fantastic.  For those IT folks, go back through your resume and add a balance of action.

Where I cannot over-stressing this point – the tools-of-trade should NEVER be the focus of a resume.

First and foremost, the premise of a well-written resume involves activity and action(s) (verbs).

If say you’re a project manager, write about organizing projects and the resultant impact.  Include how you did it and some of resulting successes. (e.g. As Project Manager, worked with 15 technical and business units to organized, consolidated and streamline delivery and QA resulting in 20% improvement of SLA and 10% reduction in licensing cost).

First and foremost, the key premise of a well-written resume involves action(s) (verbs).  A resume’s focus point should always show or demonstrate ‘doingness‘.  Writing down wha’cha did.  Keep it really simple and concise – brevity goes a long way.

Not to over complicate it, but In its simplest sense, a project or job consists of a series of actions. Often many.  Your actions affect or impact THINGS (nouns).  Never the other way.  Jokingly, a car (noun) never drives itself.

Taking a step back – skills for a resume ought to include:

• An action (verb) should beget accomplishment (nouns) and achievements (nouns).
• Reversely, an accomplishment (noun) is the result of an action (verb) or series of achievements (nouns).
• Achievements (nouns) begins with action (verb).

As a decent rule of thumb, a balanced resume ought to primarily focus on actions, or combination thereof.

In any depicted action or accomplishment, be certain to reference your tools-of-trade you used and/or implemented.

Of course, we all want to communicate what we know.  However, knowledge can rather be perceived as a personal possession (noun) versus something you are (professional), or something you do (verb).

Nothing communicates ability better than action. Action demonstrates competence.  From competence comes success.  These are your key skills for a resume.

Be warned of the advise that resumes should never exceed 2 pages. This doesn’t happen to be 100% true. As long as you’re practicing brevity with common sense, create as many pages needed to communicate – certainly shine brightly.  On the flip side, if applying for say a Marketing job, avoid inapplicable experience from say 20 years ago pumping gas.

Skills For A Resume – Golden Rules:

• Provide rich content balanced first with action then tools-of-trade
• Demonstrate ability, success and least not passion
• Practicing brevity while keeping it simple

As a caveat; long-winded and flat resumes containing lists of techno-terms do not communicate. Don’t publish these. These type of resumes wastes the time of your audience.

In closing, these are the basics Skills For A Resume – really make your resume shine.  Please feel free to drop me a note.

Below are some additional workable tips to review.

Additional Tips: Skills For A Resume:

It is good to use bullets for lists of items.  However, bullets or lists need to be balanced with their actions and details:

• • Projects consist of 50% business & personal skills. Aside from technical skills, your business & personal skills remain a critical element in demonstrating other key and desired skills or abilities (e.g. managing tasks, defining goals, working with others, planning details, etc.)
  • Practicing brevity, from a 1,000 foot view, draft a paragraph or two capturing your technical and business skills.  This could include your logic or problem solving process.  This should be a description of you.
  • Create a section, somewhere near the top of your resume, for your technologies (nouns). Categorizing these into groups: e.g. Security, Automation, Infrastructure, etc.
  • Job Section:
    • For each job or project, include a summary and description containing:
      • project detail(s)
      • goal(s)
      • deliverables
    • For each job or project include:
      • duties
      • successes
      • milestones and workstreams (optional)
  • Engineers tend to carry or hold concurrent responsibilities.  Please add some color around these
  • Include your certifications toward the bottom
  • If employment history becomes too extensive for your resume, maintain these details in another document.  Also make a note that further employment details are available upon request
  • If you have a successful method of communicating your skills and ability, stick with it.

Additional House Keeping Skills For A Resume:

• • Add all personal information at the top.  Ensure to have your LinkedIn profile included – these day, don’t overlook this must.
  • Ensure page numbers are included in the footer section
  • A resume can be longer than 2 pages.  It is false that a resume cannot be longer.  However, if you’re going to exceed 2 pages, ensure your entire resume practices brevity.
  • In resumes, you do not have to 100% adhere to grammar. However, there can’t be obviously mistakes (e.g. incorrect tenses)
  • In resumes, pronouns like ‘I’, ‘me’, or ‘myself’ are assumed and not necessary. Avoid using ‘we’ as it takes focus off you. It also takes up valuable space.
    • If using we, consider rewording to say ‘the team,,,’ or something equivalent
  • Avoiding using trite descriptive words such as adjectives, adverbs etc. (e.g. very, big, highly, funny, difficult, etc.).  In rare cases (sparingly), use such descriptive words to describe a situation or the subject. (e.g. performed a discovery of a complex pattern of redundant pool pumps). – see example below
  • Real estate space is valuable.  Do not waste it with unnecessary or trivial details. Seek to remove redundant works. Practice strict brevity, but not at the expense of underselling your skills
  • Each section is a mini-story about your duties and successes
  • Orient your audience to your mini-story
  • Maintain version history of your resumes
  • Keep it simple
  • A resume is not a narrative
  • Omit unnecessary detail or unimportant past employment history

Example

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