I was wondering if there are any HR folks on board – especially those that have hired IT employees – who may be able to offer some resumé-writing advice. Folks who are currently working in IT may also have helpful advice. I certainly appreciate any words of wisdom anyone may care to share.
I am seeking a DBA positon, or a related position in IT, in my hometown. Recently, a recruiter advised that I needed to punch up the part of my resumé that describes my current duties and responsibilities. She recommended touch-ups such as describing my databases by size (in megabytes), which is something that never occured to me as relevant to a future employer.
Currently, the section of my resumé in question reads as below:
So, how might I best apply the recruiter’s advice to “punch up” this section? What’s lacking?
Another thing I am contending with in preparing this resumé is that my current job is my first IT job. Even though I have 2.5 years on the job, my duties have remained more or less static. I didn’t learn a bunch of programming languages. I learned what I had to learn to set up and maintain my Oracle databases, and not much beyond that. I did get acquainted with the UNIX operating system, and became passingly familiar with Korn shell scripting (but hardly an expert). However, 80% of the time I was working in Windows NT/2000, which I understand doesn’t carry much weight in IT circles.
Here’s the summary of my professional skills as they apppear on my resumé. Note the dearth of programming languages – no C, no Java, no PHP, no Perl. Not even Visual Basic. I’m wondering how much of a drawback that really is, while assuming that the lack of programming esperience is, indeed, a drawback:
Oh, and that last bit in the SKILLS section describing all the graphics software knowledge? That harkens back to my previous career in graphic art/printing. I used to just figure that listing these old jobs on my IT resume couldn’t hurt, but now I wonder: does all this extra info get in the way? Does the apparent irrelevancy actually serve as a black mark against my resumé? Here is the remainder of the professional experience section of my resumé – I’ve given these jobs briefer descriptions to greater emphasize my current job:
For those able to wade through this post, I thank you. Also, thanks in advance for any advice anyone may be able to give.
Yes, I’ve done a good bit of tuning, though I wouldn’t consider it my specialty. I thought “tuning” would be subsumed under “maintenance”, but maybe it would be better to list that as a separate skill. Thanks for the tip.
Why wouldn’t Windows NT/2000 carry much weight within IT circles? I’m not questioning your information, I’m worried about myself. My own background is heavily weighted towards Microsoft, with my certifications climbing the MCSE tree. The only other certifications I hold are A+ and CNA, just to round it out a bit.
The circles I frequent (albeit, mostly Microsoft circles) always talk about the demise and obsoletion of the “old” languages, and how great it is that Microsoft crosses platforms so easily.
I don’t want to start a debate. I want some genuine, inner-circle, IT advice from some senior, tenured, IT sages. Please rescue me from ignorance, oh great ones…
As for the resume, if I was in HR, I would notice a weighted tilt towards graphic design, and a frequency of job changing that is boardering on alarming. But you definitely have the experience.
My company isn’t big enough to have an HR department, but we are IT and I review all the resumes.
I agree with Chicago Faucet that the number of jobs is worrying. Nobody likes a job-hopper. The fact you have been 2.5 years in your first IT job is a plus. Maybe you can concentrate the graphic design stuff into a more general section:
“Before moving into IT I was a graphic designer, January 1997 - November 2000, where I had the following responsibilities”. Then list things that might be of interest to an IT company looking for a DBA.
The Windows NT/2000 experience looks highly relevant. You wouldn’t get a job here without it.
I wouldn’t be too interested in knowing the sizes of your database in megabytes. To be honest, if you are measuring it in megabytes, it is pretty small stuff.
Experience of tuning (assuming that is performance tuning), is worth adding.
For the reports, do you just do what you are told? Or do you, for example, “work with senior management to design and implement reports”?
Did someone else design the “properly structured relational database”, or did you do it? Or were you involved in the design? If so, say so.
What is your involvement in the database back-ups? It is arguably hidden within “maintain”, but maybe you “are responsible for designing, implementing and testing the secure database back-up mechanisms”.
I hope the last few examples show a pattern: You need to emphasize the things that you have done that show more than pure administrative capabilities.
I hope this helps. By all means e-mail me if you wish.
That’s mostly my impression from both my Oracle certification courses and my current job. Around here, UNIX rules with an iron fist. The only reason I get to do so much work on a Win2000 machine is that my group procured its own Dell production server on which to run our databases, seperate from all the production UNIX boxes our contractors control.
Then, while taking my Oracle certification courses, our instructor drilled into our heads that we’d be using UNIX in the workforce, even though we were on NT machines in the classroom. Our Oracle textbooks gave all examples based on a UNIX environment, with Windows examples sometimes cited secondarily.
Old languages? UNIX is an operating system … are your buds talking about the obsolescence of UNIX shell scripting or something?
I’d be interested in this info as well. If it gets poor response here, I’ll start a separate thread.
Re: frequency of job changing – I was working in a town with a poor economy and few opportunities in the graphic arts. I served as a mercenary, and changed jobs to chase money. At every stop, I increased my salary. Except for the Pre-Press Manager position, every place I worked was a small operation that offered no advancement opportunity. To move up, you had to move on.
No prospective employer has ever grilled me about the number of jobs I worked over four years. Graphics/printing employers knew the score, and it probably didn’t matter to them. I don’t know how my current employer viewed the five-jobs-in-four-years thing. They seemed more interested in my Oracle certification than anything else.
It’s not that Win 2K/ MCSE is not valued in IT circles, if you know what you are doing enough to fully utilize the Windows features, you add value to a network. However, because of Windows’ nature (Wizards & GUI menus) it’s not too difficult for any computer network savvy person to pick it up and make it work. I should know, I’m a UNIX admin who moonlights with a simple Win2K network. If your knowledge extends only to building a Win2K network without some of the finer skills to intergrate a DC into an mixed environment, then your skills are “a dime a dozen”.
LOL … no doubt! My largest DB is 70 G … which still isn’t huge.
Yup … performance tuning. Let me display a little ignorance – what else might “tuning” mean if not performance tuning?
My reporting experience has run the gamut. I have created reports from scratch with no supervision when they filled a need. I have participated often in report-design-and-implementation meetings (mainly in an effort to keep users from having full-table-scan parties in my databases). And I have sometimes just executed given reports as I’ve been told.
I didn’t realize that my statement could be read to mean that I wasn’t involved in the design and setup of my databases. I designed and set up the databases myself. Early on, I’d ask more experiences co-workers questions about setting certain parameters, but now I’m at the point where setting up a an Oracle database from scratch is no problem.
I know how to perform off-line back-ups, and I’ve performed open- and closed-database recovery when needed. However, our real back-up method was to maintain a seperate-server mirror of our production database.
The verb tenses change only in the description of my current job. “Created” and “replaced” are tasks I performed in the past and have completed. “Run” is a task I still perform on a regular basis.
Although the end result may be to improve performance anyway, you could be tuning to minimize disk space usage, or memory usage, or CPU usage.
For example, there will be trade-offs between memory usage and performance. To get maximum performance, you may well want as much memory allocated as possible for caching. However, you may not be allowed to do that because other applications in the system need the memory. Similarly, if disk space is constrained, you may have to tune more for saving space than maximum performance.
However, I am a management consulting executive doing strategy work for one of the most respected systems integration firms. In this capacity, I regularly interview candidates from the top business schools and undergraduate programs. Believe, I have seen my share of resumes.
With all that in mind, here is my thinking, which applies more to the approach of your resume, than the content (you’re the IT person - you’ll know what cool language to use and applications to cite. Anyway, when I hear that someone is telling you to “punch up” your resume, I think of one thing only - RESULTS. What did you do in your position (and in earlier positions) that contributed to the overall success of the business? I see no indication of that in the examples you have in the OP.
How might you share results? Well, since I am not an IT person, I am not exactly sure, but I can ask you a few questions -
How is your specific performance measured?
How is the performance of the dbase you are supporting measured?
What “qualitative” things (i.e., non-quantiable or measurable) did you do to contribute to the company’s success?
What key measures does the company you currently work for focus on the most - i.e., what are the companies overall top 3 - 5 corporate goals?
Work very hard to answer these questions. When you do, you then need to incorporate them into your resume. Some examples I am making up on the fly might include.
Reduced average db downtime by 30%
Tuned db, increasing query throughput by 15%
Supported marketing campaign, enabling sales force to access customer data more efficiently, contributing to sales increase of 5% (note how you would be tying your work to overall company goals)
Modified db query approach in support of overall company effort to segment customers, resulting in more targeted campaigns and sales increase of 5% (linking your work to an overall company change initiative).
Your resume sells you. You therefore needs to make sure that your resume says “I am valued and contribute to the improved performance of my area and the company overall”. Have the collected set of bullets (or the action-verb sentences in your descriptive paragraph - whichever) tell a story. “I came in and improved things and enabled my company to perform better - that is clear from these results.”
OK … this is a clearer perspective that that which I had been working from. It is difficult to quantify how what I do affects the bottom line … but I will try my best. Let me give it a shot. Thanks!
