When a job opening is posted to the public at large, they are typically advertised in some way so that as many qualified applicants as possible can know about it’s existence. What follows from this is that a ton of people will be sending in resumes just like you. Somebody will have to whittle the list of candidates down to some manageable number to bring in for interviews. The sole purpose of your resume is to convince the people making that decision that you are worthy of more serious consideration. Resumes with formatting, punctuation, or spelling mistakes quickly put your chances in the trash. Experience descriptions that are vague or not at all related to the work the person who gets the job would actually have to do won’t get you through to the next round either.

With Yate’s help, or some other text of your choosing, put together a resume that gives you a chance to be brought in for a more detailed conversation. Show clear and creative writing you are capable of while helping the reader answer one of the two key questions. This gives you a chance to present yourself in person and land the job you want that helps you build a satisfying career.

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - For Anybody
• Part 3 - For the Recent or About To Be College Grad
• Part 4 - For the Early Career
• Part 5 - For the Established Career
• Part 6 - Final Thoughts

Once you’ve been around the block a few times, you’ll have a pretty deep well of information to pull from for your resume. Maybe you have a stack of performance evaluations at your disposal and perhaps dozens of projects to use as source material. The key is knowing what to use and what to skip. To a certain extent, advice at this stage in your career is not nearly as useful as it was before you had some decent experience, but still here are a few tips:

• Be careful of size. My man Martin Yate suggests 1 page per 5 years of experience in the 2006 version of his guide. A particular pet peeve of mine is resumes longer than a page, but I may be behind the times.
• What have you done for me lately? This relates to the first bullet, but things moves fast enough that what you did 8 years ago hardly matters now as it relates to the technology. For demonstrating people, organizational, communication, or other soft skills it still can make sense to use examples throughout your career, but for the techie stuff stick to the last 5 or so.
• Schoolwork. Unless you recently obtained a new degree, schooling doesn’t deserve more than a line or two. Resume real estate is precious, stick to the experience you have as much as possible.
• Emphasize the things you’ve done in your recent jobs that will help you get the one you are applying for. Not all of your experience may be relevant, be sure to focus in on the parts that are. Again, be descriptive and compare your accomplishments to what was expected or an actual dollar figure, if possible. Just listing completed projects will not be enough.

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - For Anybody
• Part 3 - For the Recent or About To Be College Grad
• Part 4 - For the Early Career
• Part 5 - For the Established Career
• Part 6 - Final Thoughts

A year or two into your first job, you might start looking around for other opportunities. Welcome to the big leagues! The good news is that you have plenty of work experience to draw from. The bad news may be that the GPA you spent so many sleepless nights on now matters a whole lot less, if at all. You will now be vying for jobs with people who are old enough to be your parents and might have been in your field longer than you’ve been alive. How do you compete with that?

For starters, you’re cheaper labor than somebody who has a mortgage to worry about, their kids college to pay for, and been around forever. You are also more likely to be willing to work longer hours. It’s not all lower pay for more work, though. You have enthusiasm that a person with decades of experience just can’t have any more. Plus, you are more likely to be up on the latest technologies and tools since you just learned them in school. An older candidate might come with a certain working style, too, and is less open to change than you are since you’re still in the prime of your youth (enjoy it while it lasts).

As such, be sure to spin your resume to these strengths that set you apart from your older counterparts. Mention a project where you put in weekend time to meet a deadline. Point out that you know how to use the latest toolset. Let your passion for your profession come across in your word choice. Where you might lack experience of an older candidate, you can make up for in these other areas and draw attention to yourself.

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - For Anybody
• Part 3 - For the Recent or About To Be College Grad
• Part 4 - For the Early Career
• Part 5 - For the Established Career
• Part 6 - Final Thoughts

When I was in college looking for part-time engineering work, my Dad told me, “Let me explain this to you: You can’t get a job without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job.” That catch 22 is the real bummer for the college graduate to be. While grades and coursework are important, nothing demonstrates your ability like work experience or internships of some kind. It doesn’t even matter if you didn’t get paid or if you never use any of the people you worked with as references. Getting hands on interactions with real problems helps sell you later better than anything else can. If you still have time to get involved with something like this, by all means do so.

“Great,” you might be thinking, “I don’t have any work experience and now you’ve shot my confidence down by telling me I’ll never get a job otherwise.” Close, but not quite. If you don’t have much or any work experience, a good tactic is to present your coursework in more detail as if it were a job. For example instead of simply listing out the titles of your courses, pick two or three relevant ones and explain the detailed things you learned or got to play with in labs.

Maybe you tuned an oscilloscope, wrote a compiler for a made up programming language, or used CAD software to design a new and improved suspension bridge. You can spin these kinds of things in a way that demonstrate your capabilities and help answer those two questions that the reader of your resume will ask. Again, keep in mind the kind of job you are applying for and if you need to go this route, pick classes whose topics most pertain to the work you’d be doing if you got hired. Don’t just list things, be descriptive about your accomplishments and how they measured up against expectations.

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - For Anybody
• Part 3 - For the Recent or About To Be College Grad
• Part 4 - For the Early Career
• Part 5 - For the Established Career
• Part 6 - Final Thoughts

When a potential interviewer looks at your resume, among the first questions he or she will ask themselves are:

1. Can this person do the job now?
2. How much training will this person require before they can do the job?

If you’ve slanted your experiences such that they can answer #1 with a “Yes”, congratulations, you’re in the interview stack. This is why it can be critical to prepare different resumes for different jobs. One set of experiences might help answer this first question for some jobs while other things you’ve done might answer it for another job. You usually run out of space on your resume and have to make tough choices on what to remove. Let your specific experiences and the descriptions of each job be your guide so that the person screening the resumes can answer this first question more easily in your favor.

Even if you don’t already have expertise in the technologies or tools the prospective employer is already using, it isn’t over for you. If you can show that you have a history of learning things quickly (perhaps with a high GPA or honor roll) or have worked with similar things that you might use in this job, you put yourself in a position to answer “Not long” to #2. That can get you in the door for an interview as well.

The second most important thing, which Yate covers but is worth emphasizing here, is that your resume gives the reader the first impression of your communication skills. You can have a Nobel Peace Prize on your resume, but if it is poorly organized and has spelling errors throughout, you’ll make the hiring committee think twice about bringing you in for an interview. A good tip here is to have someone non-technical read your resume. He or she is more likely to find the easy mistakes than your lab partner will because the acronyms and technical terms will completely go over their heads, enabling them to see the basics more clearly. Since a lot of times, hiring managers do the resume screening, having someone with a layman’s eye look at it for you might be a closer approximation to the person with the power to bring you in for an interview than you are.

The last item generally worth mentioning is that to most people, certifications or memberships in associations are not that big a deal. That’s not to say you shouldn’t list them at all, but don’t harp on them and if you need to make cuts on your resume to conserve space take these out before job experience details.

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - For Anybody
• Part 3 - For the Recent or About To Be College Grad
• Part 4 - For the Early Career
• Part 5 - For the Established Career
• Part 6 - Final Thoughts

Ugh! That’s a common reaction when people hear the word “resume”. I’ve yet to meet a person who claims to like preparing them. Yet, we all need one at many different points in our careers. I think everyone hates writing them because people don’t generally like to be judged and a resume is essentially your defense attorney by proxy in a hiring trial you don’t get to attend yourself. This series of posts will examine resume writing for a career in engineering

In a lot of ways, writing a resume is the most challenging communication task you will ever complete. Much tougher, in fact, than telling your mother you’re marrying someone she hates (or so my wife tells me). It has to relate your entire body of experience in a limited space and answer the implied, “Why should I consider hiring you?” question that anyone who reads it is essentially asking. It’s your chance to make a first impression and gives your potential new boss a glimpse of your written communication skills. No pressure, though, right?

How should you go about preparing a resume? What kinds of things do engineering hiring committees look at when deciding who goes into the stack of folks to interview versus the stack of people to forget about? Are there generally accepted resume formats? Should my resume be different if I’m straight out of school as opposed to having a job or two under my belt?

First of all, regardless of where you are in your career, you’re going to need some help preparing a resume. While some people swear by resume services that write them for you after you provide them key pieces of information about your experience, I’m not a big fan of that approach. Your resume is about you, will be defended by you when you get an interview, and should therefore be written by you. Using a service is akin to hiring someone to write a term paper for you that you then have to present orally for a grade. You can’t help but be disconnected from the material if you didn’t write it yourself.

A better way to go is to find a book that takes you through a series of exercises that ultimately produces a resume. There are hundreds of titles on this topic, most of which do a good job of staying on top of formatting and specific content trends. When I got my first job in (gulp) 1993, I went with Resumes That Knock’em Dead by Martin Yate and used the latest version to update my resume in 2006 as well. You can get that here:

Yate’s step by step instructions lend themselves to an analytical mind, which most of us interested in engineering in the first place tend to have and relate to well. He has you spend a lot of time combing your experience for different blurbs of content that you can then splice together to form resumes directed to specific jobs (more on that in a sec).The remainder of the advice given in this series is broken into sections that might benefit anybody along with specific sections for the recent graduate as opposed to someone with a few years experience before some final thoughts are covered.

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - For Anybody
• Part 3 - For the Recent or About To Be College Grad
• Part 4 - For the Early Career
• Part 5 - For the Established Career
• Part 6 - Final Thoughts