IT Resume - IT Experience Section

IT Resume - IT Experience Section

The experience section is made up of headings, statements of responsibility and statements of achievement.

The Heading - this should include at minimum:

Name of the Company you worked for
Location of the Company (City, ST) - Sometimes Country or Province
Your Job Title
Dates of Employment

Optionally, you could include multiple titles if applicable and also include a description of your company, which is highly recommended. It is acceptable to use only the year as the date and eliminate months. This is an effective way of hiding gaps in employment. If your work history is consistent then it is recommended to use months. If you have a number of jobs that lasted less than 1 year, it will be difficult to eliminate months without confusing the reader.

Statements of Responsibility - Much like the headline statement in the introduction and summary, you will want to build an opening statement that identifies the overall scope of your responsibilities. The following statements then support the opening statement and provide further details regarding your key duties. Example:

"Develop and implement financial software in support of company's flagship product. Coordinate with accounting staff to define requirements. Design software architecture. Develop software code using C, C++ and Java. Manage projects for implementation of applications. Train staff members on software utilization and provide ongoing software support."

For hands on IT professionals, you can also list key technologies that you worked with in the position, especially if those technologies are critical for obtaining your next job.

Achievements - After developing statements of responsibility, you should now document a few achievements. Your achievements are what set you apart from your competition. They help differentiate your resume from other applicants and they demonstrate that you have been successful in previous positions.

Ideally, statements of achievements should be written in the form of ACTION - RESULT. State the action, then state the positive result. If possible, try to quantify your results. Example:

* Developed application for accounting and reporting system that automated posting to the General Journal, saving $5 million in annual paper expense while increasing overall productivity.
Achievements don't always have to be in the form of action result. Other achievements can document awards, completion of training, promotions, or prominent roles (such as being selected as chair member of emerging technologies). Also, you can build statements to simply highlight key technologies or areas of technology.

Formatting duties and achievements can be done in several ways. The preferred style is to build a paragraph of duties and then bullet point the achievements below. This style really allows you to separate the 2 types of statements and helps to highlight the achievements.

Tips for developing your experience section:

1. Experience should be written in reverse-chronological format (most current job positions first). For the most part, order of items in the experience section reflect order of importance to the reader. The heading is necessary to identify critical job information. Then it is important to state your scope of work. Then highlight achievements. The order of statements within the paragraph of responsibilities should also be determined by importance. Therefore, build the opening statement and follow that statement with the next most important responsibility. Follow the same logic when listing statements of achievement.

2.. Try to start statements with action verbs (design, develop, implement, deploy, create, lead, manage, coordinate). Avoid using the same action verbs within each job, but if that is not possible, at least avoid using the same action verb in consecutive statements. Develop this, develop that, develop this, develop that.... its poor writing, reflects laziness and shows a lack of creativity. Also try to avoid the two dreaded vanilla statements (Duties included..... and Responsible for.....).

3. Make statements detailed, but don't go overboard. Brief and detailed is ideal. Even if you have 1 bullet point, don't be afraid to break it down into multiple sentences.

4. Avoid using first person pronouns (I, me, my). Also avoid using too many articles (a, an, the). The resume is not a novel or publication. Statements are meant to be quick and descriptive. This strategy really helps maintain attention of readers who quickly scan the resume. Imagine the statement above filled with articles and first person pronouns.

"I developed an application for the accounting and the reporting system that automated the posting to the General Journal, saving $5 million in annual paper expense while I increased the overall productivity."

5. Length is a matter of judgment. It really depends on how much experience you have, the level of detail involved in your job, and volume of achievements. But.... it would be highly recommended that you limit yourself to 5-10 statements of responsibility and 2-8 statements of achievement. As you start building descriptions of previous work history, you should start cutting back the level of detail. Each job should be progressively shorter as the you work your way from current to previous positions.

6. Consider dropping experience past 20 years and you should even consider just listing the headings (without descriptions) for "old" experience, especially if it has limited value.

This job is in technology, so it should be listed. But, why waste the space to build up a description of this job? For one, the job duration was only 1 year. For two, the job is not even within the field of Software Engineering. It's only significance is documenting career progression and overall length of IT experience. Most people do not have a career that is this straightforward, so the decision is much more difficult. Just ask yourself this --- "how much of an impact will this job have on my ability to market myself for a new position?" It just makes no sense to build up lengthy descriptions of previous somewhat insignificant jobs while cutting information from very significant current positions.