Help on writing my resume

I am an embedded software engineer. I wanted help in writing my resume. Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks

-- Naren

Reply to
NB
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Keep it to one page. Include education, experience, special qualifications (citizenship, security clearances now and in the past, etc).

Did I mention the one-page thing? Offer to provide more detail if needed.

Reply to
Richard Henry

Include a short description of your career goals near the top of the page, too.

I've long included detailed empoyment history on the back side of my otherwise single page resume and have been complemented for doing so.

--
========================================================================
          Michael Kesti            |  "And like, one and one don't make
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Reply to
Michael R. Kesti

Whatever you do, DON'T include a paragraph that simply lists every and each OS, RTOS, word processor, uC emulator, PCB layout application, FPGA design application, software metrics generator, or other development and test tool that you may have worked with, talked about, seen on a billboard, dreamt of, etc. You get the idea. I've read a few resumes over the course of my career, and those types of resumes are tiresome and really easy to ignore. By listing all of these applications in a single paragraph, without any context, it gives the impression that the author of the resume is trying to project the impression that they are masters of all of these applications, but we all know that this probably isn't the case.

Give context to your skills in your resume. Answer the question "How did you use these tools and what problems did you solve?" or something like that.

All of these things, plus stapling a crisp, new, multicolored US $20 to your resume will help your resume a lot!

Reply to
Bob F.

Bob F. said for all posterity...

I'm still surprised at how many resumes do exactly what you just described. However, I've seen some job postings that seem to be almost as bad.

That's not fair and you know it. Those old $20's are worth just as much.

Casey

"What happens if you get scared half to death twice?" -Steven Wright

Reply to
Casey

OK, I'm a bit confused. The employment history is essentially _all_ of my resume. Mine is up to two pages (ASCII text only, it'd be smaller if typeset).

--
Darin Johnson
    Gravity is a harsh mistress -- The Tick
Reply to
Darin Johnson

needed.

Trim it. Have a second longer resume avilable to read through with your interviewer.

Reply to
Richard Henry

How hard and fast is that rule, and how universal is it? That is the rule of thumb given to newly minted college graduates before they have anything to include.

When I've interviewed people, the resumes weren't necessarily short, and I certainly never had anyone hand me their "real" resume at the interview (I want to read it all over first and mark it up, before I meet the candidate).

Also, how important is it to have actual "pages"? My last two jobs I just sent out email with the resume, nothing was printed, and nothing had "page marks". What is the preferred method of getting a resume anyway, Word (gack), RTF (confuses too many), PDF (too expensive), HTML (too many browser types), or ASCII?

--
Darin Johnson
    "Look here.  There's a crop circle in my ficus!"  -- The Tick
Reply to
Darin Johnson

Never had any problem with 2 or 3 page resumes.... Word ( ug !) although nasty, seems to be the preferred format for most HR bimbos

Reply to
TheDoc

You're going to get many conflicting opinions on this.

Depends on your audience.

Agents generally stuff thousands of CVs in a database and tell a program to pick ones with relevant key words. So for them, DO stick in relevant key words.

Employers expend seconds per CV - they get them in junk mail quantities. So I would go for the key words on page one in big type.

Make it short and sharp: brevity is the soul of wit.

Don't dilute the impact of your strong key skills by padding it with lots of minor skills.

Make detail shorter with age, old skills tend to be faded skills.

Two pages seems fine: but the first page has to grab the reader otherwise they won't bother turning it over.

By all means paint yourself in a good light: even failures can be educational. In one short job I did, I learnt that if I can't get a chip feature to work fairly quickly, then it may well be that the chip makers screwed up big time! :-)

NEVER LIE.

E.g. if you say you can work a lathe - but can't - you might get asked to supervise someone and if they get hurt they can sue the company, and the company can rightly sue you for fraud.

Do have a fuller CV ready if/when you reach the interview stage, and they want to check the details.

Reply to
kryten_droid

Read Robin William's "Design book for non designers" for some "obvious" (when you see them) tips on layout and then print your CV on Conqueror paper.

Robin

Reply to
robin.pain

I stuck a tiny "Skills:" section at the top of mine for just this purpose.

At one company I was at, a contracted recruiter would filter everybody before sending them on for interviews. We even had a candidate we explicitly asked to apply, and we told the recruiter we wanted him, and the recruiter still turned him down (after lots of shouting on our part the recruiter changed his mind :-).

This depends. Are the major skills and the new skills the ones you _want_ to be working with? There are certainly many cases where someone just has to take a job in order to eat, and those three year old skills may be what they really like doing.

There are people that will filter a resume based on the skills. Ie, if the resume says C++ experience but not C, it may be filtered out. Likewise, if you know a huge number of programming languages and list them all, a recruiter might still think "hmm, he seems unable to learn Pascal, too bad".

If you've got the time and information, tailoring the resumes for each job application could work. If you know the particular job might use a minor skill you know, then list it, but don't list it for a job where it'll never be necessary.

--
Darin Johnson
    "Particle Man, Particle Man, doing the things a particle can"
Reply to
Darin Johnson

Similarly, I'm an undergraduate Computer Engineering major graduating in Dec. Having no employment experience in the hardware or embedded fields, I was wondering if I should emphasis side projects and school assignments involving such topics rather than my unrelated work experiences. Likewise, should specific course titles be mentioned, or is this implied by the degree? How about senior project -- is it best to list the topic and leave it open to discussion during an interview, or do employers like to see more specifics?

[Shameless plug.. but here goes] This is my current version
formatting link
if anyone has any comments about it, or recent graduate resumes in general please share!

Thanks,

-- Joe Lawrence jdl1291$ snipped-for-privacy@njit.edu

remove the $pam to email.

Reply to
jdl1291$pam

For myself as an interviewer, any side projects related to the sort of work you want to do is vastly more important than knowing where you had summer jobs in retail. Side projects are more important than school assignments. Any idiot can get through school, but very few bother doing projects when they're not required.

I don't interview a lot of people though, so my opinions won't likely be the same as someone who has to look at a new resume every day. By the time I see a resume, the candidate has already been invited to the interview, and the initial filtering has already been done. So what I want to see on a resume of someone I'm going to interview the next day may not be the sort of stuff that gets you invited to the interview in the first place.

I'm not sure. Nothing is implied by the degree of course, except to alumni of the same school. But at the same time listing it all is boring and unnecessary. If you were allowed elective classes in your major, then it might be informative to say which topics you took the electives in; this implies an interest in the subject and that you didn't just coast through. Most people reading the resume won't know or remember what most of the topics are about anyway.

I don't know anything about senior projects. But if they're significant accomplishments, then list it. Ie, if you spent 10 weeks on it, came up with your own topic, and it's relevant to the field you're entering, I'd certainly want to see it on the resume.

--
Darin Johnson
    Support your right to own gnus.
Reply to
Darin Johnson

  1. Back during the boom days, I just sent a recruiter the URL of my resume, and would have tons of calls. That isn't so anymore.
  2. Most seem to prefer Word, but I heard of some that didn't want Word (preferred text or .pdf because of the Word viruses circulating around.
***3. "If the company is a religious end user of Linux, do NOT send a Word document!", is what I was told last year.

-Mike

Reply to
Mike V.

Open and re-save with OpenOffice. They'll probably like that.

--
Al Balmer
Balmer Consulting
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Reply to
Alan Balmer

OpenOffice will also generate a pdf file at the click of a button, most modern linux distributions have pdf printers set up automatically, and you can do the same under windows (with ghostscript, or something like cutepdf). I don't understand why people seem to think generating pdf's is hard or expensive - it just requires a little thought and web searching.

Reply to
David Brown

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