Your Resume Sucks II: How to Fix the skills

One thing that I've emphasized from Part 1 is that each resume is telling a story about you. It is self-promotion, selling you to the hiring manager. It is propaganda, trying to influence the reader regarding your suitability for a particular job. 

Remember your English essay lessons? About every sentence must support the paragraph, and every paragraph must support the section, and every section must support the overall statement? 

Same goes for your resume. EVERY word on the resume must support your summary... that you deserve the job, not in a begging way, but in a "of course I am good for it" way. 

If you have a lot of relevant job history, you probably should use traditional / chronological resume where you just list all the jobs, since most of your careers you have been working toward this job you're applying for. 

But if you have very little experience (new grad? bootcamp?) or you are shifting careers, then you need to do a little more planning. You need to do a hybrid resume: a section about the skills and qualifications, THEN a section about education and work experiences. And guess which section goes first? Yep, skills and qualifications. 

If you are looking for a webdev position, and you listed a bunch of tech support jobs, you have to explain WHY those job experiences are relevant to a webdev position. Did you do tech support for a webdev company? For a webdev tool provider? Or did you just answer questions about Windows and printers and stuff unrelated to webdev? 

Let us consider an example. Let's say you are looking for a job as a junior webdev, mostly front-end static sites, nothing too fancy, no backend training.  (i.e. NOT full-stack) 

What are the skills that would be useful as a UI/UX front-end developer? List both the hard and soft skills. Go ahead, do it on paper. We'll wait for you. Give it five minutes. Just list as many as you can. 

It'd probably look something like this:

  • Hard / Tech: HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript ES6, React.js, Vue.js, Angular, SASS / LESS, jQuery, Bootstrap, Python, Selenium, Django, Jest, MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, ORM, Responsive Design, database, software development, Oracle... 
  • Soft: problem-solving, out-of-box thinking, customer engagement, verbal and written communications, project management, team collaboration, analytical, customer service, software engineering, multi-task, start-up environment, fast-paced... 
Okay, look like under Tech, there are 3 groups: web, Python, Database
  • Web: HTMl5, CSS3, JavaScript (ES6), Responsive Design, Bootstrap, jQuery, SASS / LESS, React.js, Vue.js, Angular, 
  • SQL: MySQL, MongoDB, ORM, Database, RDBMS, Oracle
  • Python: Selenium, Django, Flask
And Under Soft, there are three major groups: project management and problem-solving, communications, and misc. 

  • Problem-solving: out of box thinking, analytical mind, 
  • Communication: written, verbal, customer service, customer engagement
  • Project management: team collaboration, multi-task, startup environment, fast-paced
Okay, these are good starting points for a hybrid resume. But you have to create your OWN list, and only list skills that you ACTUALLY have. 

If you need some help coming up with a list of soft skills, just google "soft skills for (insert position)" and you would find them. Remember, pick only those you can PROVE you have, either through education or work experience. 

In the next part, we'll discuss how to rephrase your work experiences to fit your "story" or "branding statement" that you are indeed very suitable for the job. 

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