Monday, August 31, 2015

Stay Ahead of the Competition with an Updated Technical Resume

September is international Update Your Resume Month according to Career Directors International, a well-known and respected resume and career association. I am sure that there are those who will jump at this opportunity while most of you, will just pull the covers over your head. So, let’s make this as painless as possible.

First, let’s look at all of the good reasons to update your technical resume. Even when you're not looking for a new job, updating your resume at least twice a year is a good practice. Here are my reasons why.

  • If you wait too long between updates you will forget about some of your important achievements. Once a project is done, it’s easy to forget the details. 
  • Keeping your resume fresh makes it easy to also freshen your LinkedIn profile, keeping you visible and active in your professional network.
  • Stopping to reflect about your technical job and IT career is a healthy thing that everyone should take time to do.
  • Within the company where you work now, it is likely that promotion opportunities will need a resume.
  • You may encounter opportunities to do some freelance work as a consultant and an IT resume will help to get these kinds of jobs.

Here is the painless part of putting your technical resume together. You don’t have to do it all at once. Start with capturing your IT career stores. This will be the most time consuming part so just recording the information about your projects already gives you a head-up over your competition. You can write out the stories or record them – it doesn’t matter.  The purpose is to get the story details before the clear memories are lost.

For more strategic positions such as IT Director or CIO, think about these questions while you write your stories.

  • Did you overcome the challenges of managing technology in the face of uncertainty? What challenges and how did you meet them?
  • Did you define or refine strategy? Was it business strategy, technology strategy, or both? If both, what degree of strategy integration was achieved?
  • Did you determine how IT could best support business strategy? What changes were made and what impact did they have?
  • Did you enable business agility and adaptability with technology? What business pressures were relieved?


For more tactical positions, such as IT Project Manager or IT Manager, consider these questions.

  • Did you push the leading edge of technology, integrating new and emerging technologies into technical infrastructures? Which technologies, and with what business benefits?
  • Did you improve technology ROI by reducing IT overhead costs? How much improvement? What methods to reduce overhead – outsourcing, agile projects, cloud services, legacy system renewal, etc.?
  • Did you narrow the gap between leading edge and trailing edge technologies in the technical infrastructure? How and with what benefits?


For more technical roles, such as Software Developer, Systems Administrator, or Network Administrator, try to answer these questions.

  • Did you meet an impossible deadline through extra effort? If so what difference did this make to your company?
  • Did you assume new responsibilities that weren’t part of your job? If so, did you ask for the new projects or were they assigned to you? Why were you selected?
  • Have you developed and/or led the team that developed any new products, systems, software or technologies that you either used internally or marketed to your clients? 


The first major hurdle to updating your resume is to capture your project stories. It would be great to refine your achievements and get them into resume-speak, but this isn’t always practical. Consider it a major win to write down or talk about the work that you’ve done. Then go out and enjoy the rest of September!

For more information about technical resumes and IT careers, see http://www.itresumeservice.com/your-it-professional-resume-in-a-data-driven-economy/.

About the Author
Jennifer Hay is that rare technical resume writer who actually has IT experience and understands the complexities of working in a technical environment. She goes beyond a standard information gathering process and applies her knowledge of data and information management, business analytics, data analytics, data science, infrastructures and architectures, software development, project and program management, among other areas to create truly compelling messages.

Jennifer is the author of Supercharge Your IT Job Search available through Amazon. She is currently working on her second book about data and information management careers, a collaborative effort with Dave Wells, a mentor, educator, and thought leader in fields of business intelligence and business analytics. 
www.itresumeservice.com

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