If you are a career consultant, a permanent employee looking for a new opportunity, or a hiring manager looking for new talent on your team you may struggle with a technical resume. Making the right updates to your resume or finding the right resumes in the “stack” can be a challenge. With everything you do on a project how do you record all of your accomplishments on paper without it being 20 pages long? As a hiring manger, how do you find the project skills you are searching for?
Here are some simple tips to navigate the “Technical Resume”:
Technical resumes are impossible to keep to a single page. The rest of the hiring world wants only one page but a technical resume should be no longer than 6 pages. You should focus on your projects or job history for the past 10 years only. So if you still have projects listed from the 1980’s when you worked with IBM or NCR it is no longer relevant and can lead to age discrimination. If you’re a hiring manager, outline the key skills you are looking for in a candidate and review the body of the resume, skimming through looking for the key skills. Job titles are often deceiving and vary within companies so skipping past a title can help you find the right technical skills for your project which is much more important than a title.
Whether you’re the candidate or the hiring manager, the resume should be easy to read and outline all of the project information that highlight the applicable skills for a position. Permanent employees and consultants should structure their resumes the same. Even though you are permanent for one company you still work on projects and each one has a budget so you are the same as a career consultant. We all know companies ask you to work on everything including dated programs or non-technical functions. You should just list the projects that you want to focus on in your job search. List the overall mission of the project, timing, your responsibilities, environment, and your accomplishments at the end of the project. Also list Return on Investment (ROI) to the client if that data is available.
Lastly, list the technologies used. For example:
RemeduElectronic Commerce Group 08/23/2010 – Present
EDI Developer/Analyst
- Lead Mapper/Developer to migrate all maps from Gentran Integration Suite (GIS) version 4.3- IBM B2B Sterling Integrator 5.2.
- Migrated 250 maps and 100 Business Processes (bpml).
Technologies Used: IBM B2B Sterling Integrator 5.2, Windows, SQL Server 2008, SAP, IDOCS, X12
Do this for every project you want to highlight. Keep the language in the past tense focusing on your accomplishments. A common mistake is listing your participation on a team, then outlining the entire team’s accomplishments as your own. Be sure to focus on your accomplishments in relation to that of the teams. Describe your accomplishments quantifiably, how many maps, BP’s, trading partners you onboarded. What was the ROI for the client? What was the result...more efficiencies, reduced the number of maps in production, completed under budget or under project schedule.
So, if you’re searching for a position or a technical resource, follow these simple steps you will get more calls for interviews, potentially multiple offers to choose from and more qualified candidates in your "people pool". Make Remedi your first call and let us assist you with your EDI career or project searches.
