What Engineering Resume Should Look Like: for Students

Key Takeaways

recruiters only spend six to eight seconds on your rumes these are the 10 effective ways to Showcase I do want to address a pet peeve of mine so what you should be focusing instead is the in today's video we're diving into a resume makeover coaching session for Ina who's a master student in computer science with the passion for devops and cloud computing Ina is eager to take her resume to the next level she was a lucky winner from the free resume makeover that I shared on LinkedIn recently well after hearing from a lot of job Seekers facing challenges in this tough Market I decided to offer this opportunity to help more people learn and grow through a more public makeover experience here on YouTube now inhow is primarily interested in roles related to dead Bops site reliability or full stack development and her main challenges that she's facing are the coding challenges she says that she's struggling to find motivation for working on these algorithms since devop field does not really heavily emphasize coding skills I do want to answer her question but let's look at her resume first and then we'll come back to talk about the tips on coding challenges so let's dive into her resume she has a solid overall resumé format it looks quite similar to my ATS friendly resumé template that I have on my website which you can download with the link in the video description if you don't have it yet I recommend you download the template and follow along so first we're going to look at the contact headers skills then education professional experience and lastly optional sections for in hos Cas personal projects and awards and certificates that she has listed so her headline is spot-on it includes all the essential contact information LinkedIn and location the only small tweak here I would make is to check for font size consistency she is using font 11 which is fine just make sure that all the items on this line all have the same font size it can be quite distracting if parts of the sentence is using font 12 and another part is using font 11 I did also notice something off of about the page margins I'll be referencing the ultimate resume handbook a lot in today's video so let me quickly hop over to the book and search for margin and here we go in the du's section we have some general tips but specifically for margins you want to maximize your space by reducing the margins up to half an inches in all sides this means that anything between half an inch to 1 in is generally fine but once you pick a number make sure to keep them consistent on all sides I'm going to make those adjustments for you right now setting all of them to.5 in she has education next but I'm going to work off of my checklist so next up is skill section now I have to be honest I'm not really loving the way it is laid out here it appears to be a bit bbose and lengthy and let me explain in a skill section we want to highlight the skills that actually matter the ones that make you stand out now I don't really care if you use eclipse or vin or whatever it is for coding that's not exactly a skill you'll use the tool appropriate for the job whatever it may be similarly skills like git is pretty standard in teag but maybe some companies don't even use git listing these tools isn't particularly informative so instead I would suggest focusing on major programming languages or any skills specifically mentioned in the job description so for example since inoa is interested in devops including Jenkins would make perfect sense and if you're applying for a Dev hops role chances are the skills listed under the dbms might not be so relevant unless it's listed on the job description of the role that you're applying for I would just remove the entire line so in conclusion when it comes to skill section less can often be more we want to highlight the skills that matter for the job that you're aiming for making your resume more focused and impactful now on the bright side the education section looks great I've made a few tweaks like removing the start dates just the graduation date is what matters here that's the industry standard also I've taken out the minor it's only necessary if you're applying for a rule related to business and for Ina de Bops is not related to business and I really doubt that any de Bops job description would say business degree is a plus so pretty much with everything on your resume unless it's going to help you with the job you can remove them think of it as like extra baggage that you're carrying on that's quite unnecessary and distracting for the recruiters recruiters only spend 6 to 8 seconds on your resume so you don't want to be distracting them what information that's unnecessary now moving on to the main focus of today's session the work experience now she has some really solid experience here but they do need some significant updates to shine even more so before we dive in I do want to address address a pet peep of mine that I often come across the Bolding of coding languages I really don't care all that much about what programming language you use for a particular project and I talked about this in my other video titled future proof your Tech Career against AI best coding language to learn and in that video I emphasize just how irrelevant the specific language is to your job search as a software engineer picture yourself reading a captivating novel that's what your resume is trying to be you want your recruiters to be captivated in your story right so you're reading this captivating novel and you're fully immerse in the story line anticipating the next plot twist but then every few sentences the author decides to highlight random words and bold fonts that has nothing to do with the plot these bolded words disrup the flow of the narrative and pull your attention away from the story's Essence and when you boldly format random programming languages on your resume your essentially doing the same thing distracting the reader from the main Narrative of your professional experience so what you should be focusing instead is the impact of your work Ina's resume currently focuses on what she did but it doesn't really delve in why she did it or how it made a difference so as we continue keep that in mind it's all about highlighting the significance of your contributions and the value you brought to each project not the coding languages I'm just going to throw it in there again please don't do it okay I'm going to reference the ultimate resume handbook again I wrote this book because I do believe a well-crafted resume is the most important thing in your job search even candidates with impressive qualifications often struggle to get notice with their resume as they get filtered out in the resume screening process understanding the intricacies of application tracking system ATS is another crucial aspect of the job search process and the ultimate resume handbook is your go-to guide so here is the outline of the book I talk about identifying different skills optimizing your resume for ATS crafting impactful header but right now we're going to reference chapter six craft impactful work experience bullet points and specifically the section quantify contributions showcase results and impact the key here is to quantify your achievements by attaching specific numbers and data to them this allows you to demonstrate the tangible and concrete impact of your work which adds credibility to your resume it's a strategy that sets you apart from candidates who simply just add job duties this is what I did blah blah blah specific metrics like percentages Revenue growth cost saving or time reduction will provide the context and highlight the scale of your contribution and the bonus is that the skill isn't limited to just resume it's a tool that will serve you well during job interviews when you're asked about your previous work experience and even after you secured your job you'll constantly need to promote your work to your manager or other people on your teams or even other teams and this practice of focusing on impact and quantifying your numbers will help you build credibility in the workplace so we're going to look at this list from the book these are the 10 effective ways to Showcase quantification and impact on your resume so let's break it down the first two points numbers one and two are related to money which may not be so relevant for in our case but number three is a big one for her given her involvement with dead Bobs it's all about quantifying hours You' Say by optimizing process automating tasks finding more efficient Solutions four and five are about users and customers which we will talk about in a bit point six and seven are also particularly interesting for inoa because number six is productivity this involves quantifying percentages increase in productivity implementing new systems tool or workflows number seven is efficiency here you can showcase how you've made things smoother or Faster by reducing errors eliminating bottlenecks or simply just providing overall efficiency so these points align well with her work and can be highlighted to emphasize her impact and contribution effectively so let's take a look at concrete examples from ino's resume the first one mentions automated monthly process for multi-architecture images management by using buildex and R dtl first of all I removed the Bold formatting but let's discuss why this work was important an example could be that it significantly reduced deployment time maybe by 40% similarly with the second bullet point maybe she improved the application startup speed by 50% and enhanced user experience and by the way these examples were generated with the help of chat GPT I simply asked something like help me improve the bullet points on my software engineering resume give me numbers and data to show the impact and result of each bullet point and here's the work experience then I simply just copy paste the original bullet point it's a great way to use AI to enhance your resume I just use a free version of CHA PT and it's amazing what it can do Chach PT will often give you multiple examples and if it doesn't give you multiple examples you can ask for it and the reason why I like having multiple examples is is that then I can select ones that best align with my specific experience and of course I recommend conduct your own research to make sure that the numbers accurately represent your work so for inoa I added some examples that sounded interesting as a starting point as an inspiration for for you to do your own research because people often ask me I don't even know what numbers I should be asking for I've also covered five different research methods in the book if you want to explore more about how you can conduct your research here here are some additional ideas based on Ina's resume she could have maybe expanded the user base by 25% achieving 99% server uptime maybe improving user satisfaction scores by 25% you can collect this data through user surveys or feedback which falls under the impact type number five from the handbook that I mentioned earlier it could also be 25% reduction in security incidents reducing deployment Time by 25% also developed an executed Workshop to Showcase that impact you can count the number of workshops and the number of participants so for example maybe she conducted 100 International workshop for 1,000 participants so lots of impact examples to go off here that I have added to the resume and by the way I want to note that the third example at Hana TI Global project should include location and dates in month and year format to make sure it's comp compatible with the ATS scanners so if you're interested in a comprehensive list of potential ATS scanner issues you can reference the handbook in this video I'm focusing on pointing out the ones that Ina missed the red flags in her particular resume before we go into the last part the optional sections like projects and awards I just want to mention that if this video gets a lot of views and likes I'll create more free rese makeover coaching videos in the future so please let me know if this was helpful by liking this video If you would like more content like this and follow me on LinkedIn for updates on the next opportunity to win a free makeover so I can hopefully make a video like this for you as well back to the resume we're almost there she has some really interesting projects here and for the project section if you have industry experience you want to focus on the professional experience section right but as a student or career switchers you can leverage the project section to showcase the skills and keywords if you have nothing else to add to your your resume the important part for the project section is to use an elevator pitch which is similar to showcasing your impact but it focuses on the Project's goal because as a reader I don't know what this project is about so you want to tell me in one line what the project was trying to achieve which is like your impact a lot of times projects don't actually have impact that's why it's more important to Showcase your elevator pitch so I always ask cha PT to give me the elevator pitch for all my projects even on my resume and this is what Chachi P said for inas project audio sense AI turns audio into captivating videos with voiceover and subtitles powered by Jango blah blah blah blah blah for Seamless Web experience doesn't that sound so much better for the second one dear diary for us the headline is strengthen your love Bond I love that and the pitch is dear diary is a spring boot web app paired with react myquel tailored for couples to share their Journey again the idea here is to help the reader grasp the project really quickly but do not to include projects only if they align with the role you're applying for for example if a job posting calls out for MySQL experience and you don't have a real life industry experience using MySQL then you would consider adding relevant projects like dear diary for us but I'm not sure how many dead Bob job postings would ask for my SQL maybe not decision should be made on a caseby casee basis tailoring your resume to each specific role so I could you know go on and on forever into the project section and keywords but considering this video's links I'll save that for the next one because I do want to look at the last section Awards and certificates and I still need to answer her question about the coding challenges in in h she has a strong professional experience in Project sections I would actually remove the entire Awards and certificate section to save space I'm thirsty now um now that's it for the resume but remember her her main Challenge from the questionnaire we talked about earlier so her question was that she lacks motivation on working on algorithm and coding challenges because it's not going to help her job as a dead Bops engineer now here's the thing a lot of working software Engineers rarely use coding challenges in their day-to-day jobs coding challenges are kind of like SATs you don't use sat knowledge in everyday life do you no not really but just like you would study for SATs if you want to get into a university that requires it you'll have to tackle coding challenges if you're aiming for companies that use them as part of their hiring process there's really not a way around it there are companies who don't require it and you're free to go in that route if that's what you want but are you studying coding challenges because it'll transform you into a better software engineer no should there be a better way to interview software Engineers probably some schools are not even looking at SATs anymore but did they come up with a better way I'm not really sure so maybe someday companies will stop doing coding challenges too until a widely accepted alternative solution comes along you kind of have to just work on these coding challenges if you want to get into the companies that requires it so that's that and good luck to everyone and see you soon