Resume Critique
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If this is in relation to your new company startup, I would venture to think your personality and communication is critical. Use applicable discourse conventions to explain how you can add value to a particular business. While this also is true for an employee/employer relationship, as an outside IT business consultant, communication of issues and opportunities to improve profitability of a business are paramount.
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@tim_g said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
What a hiring manager or new company cares about:
- That you know technical things or have skills and experience (e.g. I can do this thing.)
- That you make good decisions and have good understanding (e.g. I think well about things.)
So a resume should only contain the above, and nothing more, nothing less?
Other than basic contact info, yes. You don't want to leave off applicable skills and experience, and anything else is filler. Things like certs and education may or may not fit into this category, depending on if they are applicable to showing skills or experience.
The goal of a CV is to show value to a future or potential employer. Skills and experience are what show that.
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I have created another iteration.
First, I removed the borders from the table. I'll work the formatting some more, as without the lines it seems awkward.
For my current position, I decided to reword a few points to make the focus be on the skills. I've pondered whether or not it would be beneficial to mention some cost savings, but the more I consider it, much of the cost savings comes from remedying poor past decisions or re-examining something that's been left on autopilot.
I removed the line about IT inventory. Further consideration makes it seem like it's as much of a selling point as saying "I manage DHCP on our network." Doing so, along with the other rewording, allowed for room to mention my home lab.
I think at this stage of my career, especially wanting to dive into the [unfamiliar] territory of Linux administration, mentioning the home lab shows some initiative -- even if it's simple and small. I could mention some of the stuff I did with my Cisco switches during CCNA training; however, methinks that would be unwise for a couple of reasons: 1. I have old equipment and likely what I learned about IOS is likely dated by now. 2. It doesn't seem relevant for looking for position in systems administration.
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This resume still leaves me with a lot of questions. What size is this company? Multi-locations, are you sole IT staff? What are your responsibilities? I would also like to see more information on what you are using group policy for, 'implementing group policy' just only tells me you have seen what a GPO looks like.
Also, all your skills should come back into play in your projects. Your skills list tells me what you have used, but your projects shows me how much experience you have with them.
I'm also not a big fan of the home lab section. If you run your home network like a business using these technologies day to day, that I'm interested in. If you followed a walkthrough and installed something, I don't care. Show me that your home lab is actually doing something.
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@flaxking said in Resume Critique:
This resume still leaves me with a lot of questions. What size is this company? Multi-locations, are you sole IT staff? What are your responsibilities? I would also like to see more information on what you are using group policy for, 'implementing group policy' just only tells me you have seen what a GPO looks like.
Also, all your skills should come back into play in your projects. Your skills list tells me what you have used, but your projects shows me how much experience you have with them.
This sounds like questions for the interview, not to be put in a novel in an attempt to get an interview. I don't think the person hiring has the time to read through all that when sifting through resume after resume.
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@flaxking said in Resume Critique:
I'm also not a big fan of the home lab section. If you run your home network like a business using these technologies day to day, that I'm interested in. If you followed a walkthrough and installed something, I don't care. Show me that your home lab is actually doing something.
Home lab shows experience, interest, and willingness to learn... among other things. I'd rather hire someone who does this stuff in his free time to learn and gain experience than someone who doesn't have it at all.
The home lab isn't meant to run your home network. It's meant for learning, gaining experience, and fun. And if someone is running their home network like a business, more to them!
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We have a massive office In Atlanta (likely bigger than everything but our Palo Alto campus). Our remote professional services team (Precious just Airwatch now doing VSAN installs and other stuff) is growing, and that kind of work is good for finding some of everything.
HPE and Veeam also have large facilities on the north side.
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@tim_g said in Resume Critique:
@flaxking said in Resume Critique:
This resume still leaves me with a lot of questions. What size is this company? Multi-locations, are you sole IT staff? What are your responsibilities? I would also like to see more information on what you are using group policy for, 'implementing group policy' just only tells me you have seen what a GPO looks like.
Also, all your skills should come back into play in your projects. Your skills list tells me what you have used, but your projects shows me how much experience you have with them.
This sounds like questions for the interview, not to be put in a novel in an attempt to get an interview. I don't think the person hiring has the time to read through all that when sifting through resume after resume.
It's not meant for the first sift through. The thing is that the person hiring has even less time to arrange interviews and ask all these questions, so if you don't answer questions in the resume, they are going to make assumptions based on every little thing you write.
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@tim_g said in Resume Critique:
@flaxking said in Resume Critique:
I'm also not a big fan of the home lab section. If you run your home network like a business using these technologies day to day, that I'm interested in. If you followed a walkthrough and installed something, I don't care. Show me that your home lab is actually doing something.
Home lab shows experience, interest, and willingness to learn... among other things. I'd rather hire someone who does this stuff in his free time to learn and gain experience than someone who doesn't have it at all.
The home lab isn't meant to run your home network. It's meant for learning, gaining experience, and fun. And if someone is running their home network like a business, more to them!
I don't fundamentally have a problem with it being on there, it just doesn't tell me enough with the information provided. What was actually done with it?
Listing all the IT books you've read and training resources you've used would show me initiative as well, but what I'm most interested in is what you've actually used in production, so if you can show me you actually USED something long term in your home lab, that's much more interesting.
Maybe even if the home lab section was showing me the home lab stack rather than something that I could interpret as "I did this once in my home lab"
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I agree, the more you can show the home lab as a long term, solid environment, the better. To some degree, this is for the interview, but getting the idea across is good.
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How many resumes should you have? Do you have 3 or 4 different offshoots depending on what position you are applying for?
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@irj said in Resume Critique:
How many resumes should you have? Do you have 3 or 4 different offshoots depending on what position you are applying for?
I use one, maybe two at most.
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@irj said in Resume Critique:
How many resumes should you have? Do you have 3 or 4 different offshoots depending on what position you are applying for?
This is a good question that I'd also like to hear other's thoughts on. I've seen resumes that made me think "Did you apply for the right job", and so I've always tailored my resume to each job I've applied for. However, recently I applied for a job with a tailored resume for the job, and then after my first interview they started getting ideas about other things they could use me for and my second interview was mostly just answering questions that would have been answered by my resumed if I hadn't tailored it as much.
My currently thinking is to make sure your resume is relevant to the field of the job you are applying for, and only do minor tweaks.
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@flaxking said in Resume Critique:
@irj said in Resume Critique:
How many resumes should you have? Do you have 3 or 4 different offshoots depending on what position you are applying for?
This is a good question that I'd also like to hear other's thoughts on. I've seen resumes that made me think "Did you apply for the right job", and so I've always tailored my resume to each job I've applied for. However, recently I applied for a job with a tailored resume for the job, and then after my first interview they started getting ideas about other things they could use me for and my second interview was mostly just answering questions that would have been answered by my resumed if I hadn't tailored it as much.
My currently thinking is to make sure your resume is relevant to the field of the job you are applying for, and only do minor tweaks.
Pretty much. Mine are basically "tech resume" and "management resume."
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@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
Imagine if someone claimed to be saving the company $100K per year by ordering plastic Bic pens instead of gold plated ones. Everyone would laugh at them for making up such a silly alternative to show value. That's what is going on here. Its' a false comparison to make something trivial and standard appear like a big success.
No way I would laugh at someone being able to accomplish this. Unless the company was just going into administration and this was part of extreme cost cutting measures, the challenges this person must have faced, the endless number of meetings needed to try to convince people they no longer get gold pens and now get plastic bic.. hats off to you sir, that is quite an accomplishment
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@EddieJennings if it's of any value, here are my two main CVs I now use. Current Summary and Current
I used to make a lot of CVs but have now realised the waste of time that was and keep it to these two ones now mostly.
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@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
Why are you saying I'm comparing to failure? No failure here.
IT is business. Business buying fifteen servers to do the job of one is failure. Period. That's what failure means in business - not doing things that are good for the business. You are cherry picking a massive failure (wasting $150K for no reason) and using that failure assumption (where did that come from?) to compare against "what was done."
Buying sixteen servers to do the job of one is literally just like driving the taxi into the brick wall. It's insane, illogical and no one that knows how to drive would do it. So you don't use avoiding brick walls as the baseline for success. You don't use 16,000% overprovisioning as the baseline for success, either.
I didn't say but 16 to do the job of one. I said buy one, where 16 was proposed. Showing you can help a company and steer them in a better direction saving money is a great thing.
But how did sixteen get propose and why was the company talking to someone looking to screw them like that and why was that taken seriously? See the problem? To make the Hyper-V deployment sound "cool" we have to throw the company competence under the bus. And in doing so, we take any value proposition that we add to it along with it because we've only demonstrated that "business smarts" are what was missing.
If the goal is to show business smarts, you can't push business smarts in front of the bus.
Because, whatever reason for any bad project. Whoever can stop bad solution for far better, should say that. Stopping the bollocks up project and putting something better in place is a success.
Not success that you want to brag about to someone else. Telling them that the place you worked for was incompetent but that you were at least "less incompetent" is absolutely not what you want to be showing off on your CV. You want people to want to hire you, not want to avoid you.
Also, you can't explain purchasing scenario's on a resume line. There are too many factors. Maybe that other plan included a DR site and you cut those out in going to "1" server. Maybe you run mission-critical systems that people's lives depend on and you really should have app HA, FT, and VM HA, stretched clusters and other systems and you just went cheap. Maybe the application is used by 1 person and it does nothing and ZERO servers were the right amount. The only case where discussing "number of servers" matters is if the company hiring is looking for skills associated with managing at scale (Someone with 1 Host isn't going to likely know vCenter, OpenManage or SCCM very well). A single server shop tells me that you likely are not familar with remote datacenter operations.
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I believe I'm almost to where I have a final draft. Thank you to all who have provided feedback and discussed various points of relevance throughout the thread.
Here is the most recent revision.
I altered the formatting of the skills table, so it should now be better aligned. I also altered some wording of the Network Administration section. Most notably I expanded on the few things I did with group policy.
What I see as my final decision is whether or not to keep the couple of lines about the lab I'm building at home. Part of me believes it's an asset, as it would indicate that I'm doing training outside of the day-to-day work task. Part of me believes it's a liability as so far all I've done is create / destroy VMs in a Hyper-V and KVM environment. The only current VM in "production" is my DNS server.
I'm still young within my IT career, so it's not going to be possible for me to craft an impressive, look-at-what-all-I-have-built-and-managed resume and have that resume be connected to reality at this time.
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@eddiejennings said in Resume Critique:
I'm still young within my IT career, so it's not going to be possible for me to craft an impressive, look-at-what-all-I-have-built-and-managed resume and have that resume be connected to reality at this time.
It is not about age or time in the field. I had a resume better than most people with 10-15 years experience less than 3 years in the field. Find the right job (Consulting for a partner/VAR/MSP) and this can change VERY VERY quickly.
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@eddiejennings said in Resume Critique:
Part of me believes it's a liability as so far all I've done is create / destroy VMs in a Hyper-V and KVM environment
Go do a few of the free Hands on Labs so you can speak to knowing the interface and how things work.
Get your VCP class and cert for a few hundred bucks from vmware.stanly.edu online!
