Your resume is boring. That's probably by design. Nothing to be ashamed of there.
These days, resumes are often geared two audiences: the recruiter and the employer. They have different needs and it might be difficult to convey the information best to both parties at the same time. This is not unlike your web site which also has two different audiences, the search indexers and the human browsers. A lot of money has been in trying to keep your web site optimal to both the former and the latter, sometimes with hilarious results.
In this post, I'd like to examine a very simple way to convey information on your resume: your broad skill set. I'll focus on technologies here since I have a resume geared towards a job in the IT sector. Keep in mind that this style is probably better for those in the same boat as it relies on a concept familiar to most technologists (except, perhaps, the team at Blogger): the tag cloud. In the tag cloud, all the tags you used to categorize your posts appear, with tags used more frequently appearing more often. Most blogging engines support this natively.
Let's substitute "blog" for "resume" and "tag" for "skill" where skills with larger fonts are those which I am most skilled/experienced with. What do we have? A "skills cloud" if you will. My looks a little something like this:
Actionscript Ant cfcUnit ColdFusion Coldspring Dojo Toolkit Farcry Groovy Hibernate Java Javascript Jetty jQuery JUnit Mingle MySQL Oracle PHP Prototype Rake Reactor Ruby Rails SharePoint Spring Spry SQL Server Tomcat Transfer YUI
As you can see, it plainly apparent which skills I have and my relative strength in each. A good recruiter would use my employment and education to get a baseline level of a few skills to be understand the relative disparity.
If you wanted to separate your skills based on categories -- on my resume I have a frameworks, database, and programming language sections -- you can color-code your tags where like colors indicate the same category. Of course, most resumes are not printed in color so be careful on this one.
These days, resumes are often geared two audiences: the recruiter and the employer. They have different needs and it might be difficult to convey the information best to both parties at the same time. This is not unlike your web site which also has two different audiences, the search indexers and the human browsers. A lot of money has been in trying to keep your web site optimal to both the former and the latter, sometimes with hilarious results.
In this post, I'd like to examine a very simple way to convey information on your resume: your broad skill set. I'll focus on technologies here since I have a resume geared towards a job in the IT sector. Keep in mind that this style is probably better for those in the same boat as it relies on a concept familiar to most technologists (except, perhaps, the team at Blogger): the tag cloud. In the tag cloud, all the tags you used to categorize your posts appear, with tags used more frequently appearing more often. Most blogging engines support this natively.
Let's substitute "blog" for "resume" and "tag" for "skill" where skills with larger fonts are those which I am most skilled/experienced with. What do we have? A "skills cloud" if you will. My looks a little something like this:
Actionscript Ant cfcUnit ColdFusion Coldspring Dojo Toolkit Farcry Groovy Hibernate Java Javascript Jetty jQuery JUnit Mingle MySQL Oracle PHP Prototype Rake Reactor Ruby Rails SharePoint Spring Spry SQL Server Tomcat Transfer YUI
As you can see, it plainly apparent which skills I have and my relative strength in each. A good recruiter would use my employment and education to get a baseline level of a few skills to be understand the relative disparity.
If you wanted to separate your skills based on categories -- on my resume I have a frameworks, database, and programming language sections -- you can color-code your tags where like colors indicate the same category. Of course, most resumes are not printed in color so be careful on this one.
