Welcome to Draft Your Resume. After watching this video, you will be able to: Compose a basic resume Determine what you should include in your resume List your skills and experience appropriately and with good organization Identify how to optimize your resume for automated tracking and search engines Technical fields have many job opportunities available, but they are very competitive, and you will need to market yourself to find the role you want. To land a position, you will need a plan to stand out and capture the attention of potential employers. Regardless of the methods in your approach, you will need a good resume that lays out your skills and experience concisely and effectively. Your resume, along with your portfolio, will create the first impression that potential employers will have of you. As with your portfolio, your resume must be carefully designed to showcase your strengths and competence in the field. Contrary to what many people believe, your resume should not be a paper version of your portfolio. Your portfolio and resume should be in alignment so that they complement each other. Before discussing the nuts and bolts of writing a resume, here are a few tips to remember: Try to keep your resume brief. If you have a lot of relevant experience, two pages is acceptable, but try to avoid more than two pages. If you use a bulleted list, bullets should be informative but concise. Consistently use present tense for your current position and past tense for all earlier projects. Check your spelling and grammar carefully. Have a friend proofread your resume if possible. Double-check your contact information and provide a professional-looking email address. The work experience section will usually be the largest part of your resume. It may either precede or follow a projects section, depending on which you would like to highlight more. Applicants newly out of school may also highlight the education section if it contains a lot of relevant information. The order or placement of the information may also vary across template designs. When providing information about your work experience, follow this pattern with your statements: use an action word, then the task you worked on, and then the result in quantifiable terms if possible. For example, “Deployed improved database design, which increased efficiency by 25% and saved 15% in storage.” Some action words include initiated, constructed, converted, deployed, led, and designed. Of course, you may think of others. If you are new to the job market, it may make sense to include a Projects section. In it, you can list projects you have done that might not fit clearly into a job role. Eventually, when you have more work experience, this section won’t be needed. Including a section that lists your skills specifically helps to highlight them, since your past job descriptions might not make them clear. Include only technical skills that are relevant to the type of position you’re looking for. List as many of your skills as you can think of and include any software and tools. Then, when you want to apply to a specific job, review the job description and delete the skills not required in the role. You can always add a few additional skills that will help you stand out, but don’t overwhelm the employer with too many listed skills. Depending on the format of your template, the skills section can appear as a list, or it may include a graphical representation of the level of mastery in each skill. An Education section will highlight your formal study history. Enter your education history in the following format: Degree Type and Major University Name Year Graduated GPA and any honors you earned if you prefer If you have hobbies or interests that are relevant to a particular job, these may help boost your resume. However, if you are applying for a job in which you have considerable professional experience and skills, they aren’t necessary. In fact, they can be distracting and overly personal. You should consider putting hobbies and interests on your resume only when: You have limited work and educational experience. You have limited skills related to the job for which you’re applying. A job posting lists responsibilities or duties that align with your hobbies and interests. Other additional sections that may be useful include conferences, publications, awards, and technical trainings and certifications. Include these if they are relevant to a position, but don’t include them if they are merely padding. Excellent communication and presentation skills go hand-in-hand with the technical skillset required to succeed in data science. As the number of free and available eye-catching templates has increased and publisher software grows more robust, creating a visually attractive resume is easier. However, in a data-driven world there are other points to consider. In addition to having relevant content and visual appeal, your resume should be easy for applicant tracking system (ATS) software to find. ATS software is widely used in technical fields. It simplifies the process of selecting qualified candidates by automating the job of sorting through thousands of job applications. The software finds keywords and advances qualifying candidates further into the job application process. Unfortunately, most resumes formatted with multiple columns, images, and creative layouts or designs will not be read correctly. Simply put, ATS software is less likely to accurately read the example on the right, which can lead to a qualified applicant losing a chance to be considered. Tips for creating an “ATS-friendly” resume include: Align your terms with those on job postings. Be sure you’re using the same words most people in the industry use. Don’t use keywords randomly. ATS software can detect keywords placed out of context. Make your resume scannable. Organize the information well and keep descriptions concise. Make sure your contact information is at the top of the page. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of writing web content so that it ranks higher in web searches. You can aim to incorporate SEO and ATS-friendly elements into your resume to boost its online searchability. Often the principles that apply to making your resume readable by an ATS will be the same as making it findable by search engines. Here are some principles for making your resume easily read by ATS software and search engines: Use keywords purposefully. Include them in normal text, and don’t just list them somewhere on your page. If your resume does not contain phrases or terms that search algorithms are set to find, your content will not appear among the search results. Keep up with emerging terminology and acronyms and make sure you refer to skills or technology using common terminology. Provide relevant links and regularly verify that they work. You may want to incorporate links to your social media profiles if you are using them as platforms to build community with colleagues and other professionals in the industry. Be sure everything in your social media profile is something you want a prospective employer to see. Avoid using large image files in your portfolio or resume. Add alt-text to every image, photo, and graph you incorporate into your portfolio and resume. Users and website visitors who are visually impaired rely on alt-text and screen readers to gain understanding of content in graphic format, and this also adds keywords. Almost all ATS software works best with Microsoft Word and many companies only accept resumes in this format, so you should have a Microsoft Word version of your resume. Alternate versions of your resume may be provided in many other formats, including: Graphic Plain text Braille PDF or accessible PDF In any language other than English In this video, you have learned: Your resume is the first impression you make on an employer, so it’s important to make it great. Effective resumes follow best practices for how sections are organized and written. You’ve learned how to do this. ATS and SEO software is in common use, and your resume must be easy for these systems to scan and find. A resume is your front-line tool in finding a job. Spending some time and effort to create a good basic resume that you can tailor to any job is well worth doing.
