Staffing Solutions of Hawaii: Information Technology

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Tips to Show Your IT Skills on Your Technology Resume

By Allan Hoffman, Monster Tech Jobs Expert

Employers often screen candidates based on their technical skills, so technology job seekers naturally want to make sure they present their skills properly. As a result, creating the skills section of a technology resume section can be a challenge.
Typical resume issues technology professionals wrestle with include:

Whether to list skills alphabetically or in order of importance.
Whether to include every skill and how much detail to provide.
How to differentiate between expert knowledge of a technology with passing familiarity.

Don't Exaggerate
One recruiter's advice is simple: Don't obsess over the skills section to the point of embellishment. "In adding a skills section to their resume, a lot of people have a tendency to exaggerate their level of expertise in various technologies," says Scott Hajer, senior corporate recruiter for Software Architects. "They figure the more keywords, the more exposure."
Such tactics are likely to backfire, especially during a technology job interview. "We had a candidate who had a big grid on his resume, listing all the skills he had and rating himself on a scale of 1 to 5 in them," says Hajer. One of the skills was J2EE, with a "3" (for average ability) tagged to it. "When asked to talk about J2EE, he could not even define the term, much less talk about his experience in it," he says.
Some employers provide questionnaires asking candidates to rate themselves on particular technology skills, but they don't expect such ratings in a resume's skills section. Keep things simple. Denote each technology skill with the number of years' experience or, if you're intent on including a rating, with words like novice, intermediate and expert.
Skills and Their Uses
The skills section should be buttressed with job descriptions detailing how those skills have been used in the workplace. For example, a resume listing Java, Oracle and UML in the skills section should describe how each technology was employed on a particular project. Those details provide employers with genuine insight into the depth of a person's knowledge and experience with those technologies.
Stay Relevant
Consider these tips:

Delete outdated skills or those with no relevance to your resume objective.
Separate technology skills into familiar categories such as operating systems, networks and programming tools.
List skills in the order of their relevance to your objective, rather than alphabetically.
If you've only read about it in Computerworld or on News.com, don't include it.

Resume Organization
Technology job candidates may want to place the skills section after the job objective and before the experience section. But there are exceptions. If you're just starting out, you may want to place a greater emphasis on education and internships. If you're seeking management or sales positions, you may want to avoid crowding the resume with a list of technical skills. Instead, consider placing the list below the experience section or adding other elements, such as communication abilities and foreign languages, to the skills section.
Here are examples of one job seeker's technical skills section:
Paragraph Format -- the Most Common

Languages:

Tools:

Operating Systems:

List Format -- Gives Employers a Quick Overview

Languages	Tools	Operating Systems
Java XML C C++ JavaScript SQL HTML UML	Borland JBuilder Sun ONE Studio (Forte) Macromedia Dreamweaver MX Rational Rose UltraEdit-32 Borland CBuilder Oracle SQL Plus	Windows (XP, 2000, NT) IBM OS/2 2.0 HP-UX 9.0 DEC VMS 4.1 Unix (Linux and Sun Solaris)

List Format with Years of Experience -- Shows Depth

Web Technologies	Dreamweaver, JavaScript, HTML	4-7 years
Languages	Java, C, C++, UML	5-8 years

List Format with Years of Experience and Skill Level -- More Detail
An alternative is to denote only the years of experience.

Languages	Years' Experience	Skill Level
Java XML C C++ JavaScript SQL HTML UML	6 3 6 4 6 4 6 2	Expert Intermediate Expert Intermediate Expert Intermediate Intermediate Novice

Friday, October 26, 2012

Volunteering Can Buy You IT Experience

By Allan Hoffman, Monster Tech Jobs Expert

A supposedly hot certification or a few months of technology training isn't always enough to propel you into the market for tech jobs. Employers almost always prefer to hire people with real-world experience.

To aspiring techies, it's a catch-22: You can't get a job without experience, and you can't get experience without a job. One solution: Volunteer work.

Grassroots environmental groups, homeless shelters, churches and other nonprofit organizations often rely on technology professionals or professionals-to-be to do everything from set up local area networks to develop Web sites. Though it's not a guaranteed way to overcome having no professional experience (nothing is, after all), volunteering is a valuable way to prove yourself outside the classroom. It can also help you make the contacts essential to a successful job search.

"It's great hands-on experience, and it looks good on a resume," says Joan Heberger, program associate at TechSoup, a San Francisco-based organization with a program that matches techies with volunteer work. "It's building technology skills, but also people skills. It's also showing that you can see things through to completion."

That's just what employers want to know when they've got an applicant who is self-taught or newly trained. Can the applicant work on a team? Can he handle deadlines? Does he know how to translate classroom lessons to the workplace? Volunteer work provides answers to those questions, and it can also provide something else you'll need. "You're probably going to get references out of it," Heberger says.

Case Study in Volunteering
Consider Charles Smith, now the network administrator for the Center for Media and Independent Learning at the University of California at Berkeley. When Smith started to volunteer through TechSoup, he was in the midst of a career transition, having worked as a chef for 10 years. In his volunteer assignments, Smith worked as a computer technician, rebuilding and troubleshooting computers for underprivileged families for Berkeley Neighborhood Computers and designing Web sites for nonprofits through CharityFocus.

"Volunteering at these different nonprofits allowed me to try several different types of jobs in the high tech industry," he says. "I was able to figure out if I liked writing code for Web sites or tearing apart old computers."

Techies in some fields will have an easier time than others looking for volunteer opportunities. Anyone with an A+ certification, for instance, is likely to find organizations, such as Berkeley Neighborhood Computers, devoted to rebuilding donated PCs. Web designers and developers are also likely to find groups looking for free assistance with their sites. Those looking to gain networking experience may have more of a challenge, as organizations may want an experienced techie for the job. Even if you're not able to set up a network on your own, consider opportunities that would allow you to assist in the task.

Of course, if you're planning to volunteer, you should also have a genuine desire to help the organization rather than just gain quick experience and split once you've got a full-time job. Experienced IT pros often find a distinct type of reward in their nonprofit work. "If you set up a network for a nonprofit, you can immediately see it's made a huge improvement," notes Heberger. "That's one of the reasons why they volunteer; the impact is visible."

Where to Volunteer
Techies looking for volunteer opportunities should consider these resources:

Volunteer Matching Organizations: These groups match volunteers with opportunities. Some, like TechSoup in San Francisco or Voluntech.org in New York City, specialize in connecting techies with volunteer assignments. For a listing of volunteer matching services, see the list at TechSoup.org.
Community Volunteer Centers: Many communities have volunteer centers or point people to coordinate opportunities. Call the city or town hall or the Chamber of Commerce to find the appropriate contact.
Do-It-Yourself Volunteering: You may want to create your own volunteer assignment. If you're associated with a particular organization, suggest a tech-related project you can handle.