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The "Professional Summary & Work Experience" Lesson is part of the full, Getting a Software Engineering Job, v2 course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:
Jerome begins breaking down the components of an effective resume. A resume begins with a summary or objective statement along with contact information. Work experience should highlight how the responsibilities of previous positions directly apply to the roles a candidate is seeking.
Transcript from the "Professional Summary & Work Experience" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> All right. So now we are in the first thing that we need to work on. Now first thing we're going to be focusing on working on because like we don't have enough time for your to do your outline for your brag documents. And your branding database, but you take that, you can make that as a template.
[00:00:17]
I also have a template for your resume as well attached to that, here's the most difficult yes yet most simple part of getting your getting ready for a job. Your resume is a powerful tool that serves as a concise summary of your your skills, expertise and achievements right.
[00:00:42]
This is gonna be the first thing that the robot is gonna see you the AI is gonna see, HR is going to see the developers are going to see it's going to be the fang pass out around a table everything right? So this is very important. The purpose of these purpose primary purpose is to provide a snapshot a professional history, or how that professional history correlates with the industry trying to break into.
[00:01:08]
It's very important to remember when you're looking at your job, your job history and seeing where can I, even though it's not technical, where can I pull the technical components and technical parts out? That's very important, right? When I was first interviewing and I was like. There's nothing about my jobs or my industry or anything like that that could help me become a technologist.
[00:01:38]
I was like, this is going to suck. Then I started learning more about tech and learning and doing this one on one correlation. My military experience had lots of things that helped me become a technologist. Lots of, my degree in criminal justice, lots of things to help me with technology, understanding patterns, right, that's a very important thing in criminal justice and forensics, right, understanding, picking up the clues and being able to put those together, that's very important.
[00:02:11]
Have you ever debug code that isn't yours? It is the exact same thing as trying to solve a murder loop the same thing except there's no bad guys at the end. But that I mean, the one on one correlation was there and I was like, wow, I can I can do this because I've done that part.
[00:02:30]
So this part, probably a little less stress, except I'm using semi-colon, everything goes bye-bye, but that's what you want to do. You wanna have it as your primary purpose, as a snapshot of your professional history and how it correlates with where you want to go. Alright, the structure of your resume.
[00:02:49]
Typically it is structured as a format of sections, right? So you have your contact information, professional summary or objective, work experience, education, skills, achievements, and awards. These are the core parts of your, of every resume. Now they don't have to be in that order the two that has to be mandatory up top should be your professional summary should be your contact information.
[00:03:19]
Those two should be up top. Now with your professional summary that is also a place you should be putting the key words for the resume or for the job in there as well. You need to make sure you write your professional summary in a manner where keywords are interchangeable.
[00:03:37]
Right. So now that we've done that, if you look at the if you look at the template that if you could pull it up, that would be fine as well. I don't need it. I actually know this part. I don't like the back of my head because I've yelled at more than enough people about this.
[00:03:55]
You go to README, the README.md, there should be your resume at the bottom, and your resources. It's a template. You can export it as markdown, HTML, PDF. You can edit it however you want to. So as you see, the top. Professional summary, contact information. That's the only two places you should have your contact information, right?
[00:04:19]
I mean, the only place you should have it, professional summary. Professional summary is where you should be interchanging the keywords based upon what's in a job. Make sure your professional summary actually matches. Actually it's worded in a manner where you can switch out keywords as needed, right? So now we get into that work experience background.
[00:04:38]
I always put the work experience first cuz that's usually the hardest part, especially if you're a non traditional programmer coming from like an entrepreneur science background or bootcamp or self taught. That's the part where you tend to like need to focus on how do I correlate my current my job paths for where I want to go to say this is why I should be able to do this.
[00:05:03]
So I always put that first. Unless I'm coming from a CS degree background, then I put education first, right? Yes?
>> How about writing accomplishments and positions? Is it okay if I have 10 lines or should I, in the last two positions, is that okay?
>> 10 lines of accomplishments in the last two positions?
[00:05:24]
>> Yeah.
>> I try to keep it up to like three have between three to five. But if you don't if you're lighten other ones by all means, you know go for broke.
>> Another question. In the context of the job hunt is finding your targets before you do your reconnaissance like job titles are a meaningless phrase of strings.
[00:05:44]
So how do you find things that are appropriate for you
>> well if I'm on LinkedIn always looking for say you you've never had a job in tech. I am going to look for entry level to less than a year of experience I'm going to first focus on the experience.
[00:06:02]
Then I'm gonna focus on the skills that are strong, your strongest and you said Python. So I'm gonna look for entry level two years of experience with Python. I know that for a fact you've said already, you're starting your undergraduate career. So I know you've been to college at this.
[00:06:18]
So they may be looking for college degree but also maybe looking for equivalent work. So I'm going to look for them to explicitly say college degree or equivalent experience, right? Because you actually gain your experience of writing Python while in college. So if your degree may not match computer science, I still know that you have like an analytical mathematics based degree, right?
[00:06:42]
So these are like the three things I'm looking for before I'm even going into anything else about this company, right. So like that's how I that's how I break it down. I'm always looking for the you know like say it's like forensics right. It's like looking at the clues of like like you know a crime scene like you know so you have to look at your strengths.
[00:07:05]
So first, I guess that's how I look at it first, first look at your strengths. And then do your reconnaissance based upon your strengths, right? Like so because it said that's what I gather. Speaking to you, I think we spoke your intro was maybe five minutes long and under five minutes like 3040 seconds long, right?
[00:07:22]
But just based upon those 3040 seconds. That's how I would look for a job for you. That's where I would start, right? And then as I would go deeper, that's why I was like, I really wanna get a one-on-one with this gentleman so that way I can see exactly where he needs to go.
[00:07:38]
And how he needs to search and how to be strategic for that, right? So that's just a quick overview of how I would do that.
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