Resume Draft

jstn's picture

Student Feedback

jrdavies's picture

The instructor blog recommends that you only include your GPA if it's over 3.5, but my opinion is that a 3.41 is pretty good too, so I'd probably leave it on there. Other sources recommend 3.0+. I haven't read anything about listing high school diplomas, but your graduation is inferred now that you've been to Purdue, and I don't think that anybody is going to care about your high school GPA either. It seems like wasted space.

As for work experience, make sure that you use parallel action verbs, as recommended in the instructor blog. I see a few of them that don't agree (e.g. in charge of, include, performed, served). Also, "maintenance" is misspelled in your description for .NET Programmer. You may also consider losing the "and or" and either putting "and/or" or just "and." Your work experience seems fairly specific though. You give details of the jobs you performed, and that's good.

Your skills section seems rather long, and I don't know if that would come off as impressive, or if a reader would just skip over it. Personally, I can only remember 1 or 2 of the skills I read. Do you have a lot of experience with all of these programs and languages, or have you just dabbled in some of them? You should only include those that a) you are very comfortable in using and b) are most relevant to the job.

In your honors and activities, are you referring to your years of high school or college? I'm assuming that the golf team and honor roll are from high school, and I don't think they are relevant. What kind of band were you in? What instrument did you play? Is that relevant to the job? And those honors programs probably don't mean much if they're from high school either. Where did you have perfect attendance for 11 years? That's definitely a strong point because employers prefer people who don't miss work, but it isn't clear whether you had perfect attendance at school, an old job, or your weekly dungeons & dragons gathering.

Your format looks pretty good. The columns align well, and it's easy to scan (except for the skills section). Instead of listing your personal information down the center (near the top), maybe you could consider putting the address on the left and your phone/email on the right. It seems a little unbalanced up there. Your email address has a hyperlink too. The "evaluating your resumes design" document explains how to get rid of that.

Resume Darft

jonesae's picture

Your resume was one that I though was formatted rather well however there are definitely some places you could improve on. The major thing that stood out when I read your resume was how much reading there was. This is just my opinion but bullets are your friend. Instead of having a paragraph explaining what you did in a certain position just a few bullets. From the readings that we have done I think it is pretty safe to say that recruiters are not going to want to read your resume the way it is currently written. They’ll look at the position titles and then just skip to the next section assuming that they know what you have done in a particular position.

Speaking of the next section, your skills section, again, is hard to read quickly. You want to make the important things stand out. The A+ and NET+ certifications should stand out as well as your familiarity with both Windows and Mac OSs. iPhone? Email/IM? What person these days don’t have these skills, especially in the technology field. I would try and be as specific as possible when listing your skills as well as using bullets or some other way to make them stand out than to bunch them all up in a paragraph.

Finally you should definitely remove all things involving high school. Those might have been okay if you were a freshman looking to get your first job in college, but if you’re trying to get a job in the real world you should get rid of them. Trimming those items out will then give you more room to make your resume easier to read.

Andy

Resume critique

Matt's picture

Justin, overall your resume is written pretty well. The thing I challenge you to do is think about what it would be like to read if you were the recruiter. Initially what stood out to me most was lots of work experience. Which is a good and bad thing I think? Obviously you have lots of qualified work experience, however reading through each of these took a lot of time. Specifically more than 30 seconds. I would try and be more to the point and use appropriate parallel action verbs in order to catch the reader’s attention. Obviously you have used some of these but might want to re0evaluate some of you work experience descriptions. I would also consider using bulleted lists to organize your work experience descriptions too.

I also noticed you had your skills and certifications listed after your work experience. I personally would list it before. In my opinion it allows the reader to notice what skill sets you have and then when reading your relevant work experience they can formulate an opinion in their head of how you may have utilized your certain certifications and skill sets. Also make sure you list relevant skill sets that apply to what you actually want to do. Not just every single technical skill set that you have acquired.

The last thing I noticed was you honors and activities. Like jrdavies said, I would really only list relevant and most current information here. I don’t feel like most potential employers read through this part anyways, so it doesn’t necessarily need to be full.
Overall,

Not a bad resume, just clean it up a bit and I think it will be excellent. Once you re-evaluate how you have listed your job experience I think it will flow a lot better and be very easy to read through quickly and get the necessary information.