Could you please read my (a labviewer) resume?

[GSR]

Dear all,

I understand that my question may not fit well in this forum. However, I consider myself a Labview programmer, so giving a labviewer's suggestion on his resume should not be off topic.

There are a few reasons that may cause me not able to get interview. One is my resume, so could anyone please give me some suggestions about my resume?

thanks

[ned]

A couple of really quick comments, although this probably deserves a more detailed reply:

- Spell LabVIEW with VIEW in capitals (that's the official name)

- You don't need to list your major when you've already given it with your degree (ie, no need to put both "Master of Science - Bioengineering" and "Major in Bioengineering")

- Remove "Programming" following names of computer languages in both your courses and skills sections. Similarly remove "Drawing" after CAD.

- Remove the skills section entirely, or at least make it much shorter. There's a lot of overlap with both your technical courses and your past experience. Use the experience section to highlight actual use of your skills. The two skills you list as "Expert" are not improving your resume. Do you really want to tell people that your strongest skills are "M.S. product" (did you mean Microsoft Office?) and browsing the web and downloading files ("HTTP,FTP")?

- Spell technique properly (it's not technic)

[TobyD]

QUOTE (zmarcoz @ Jan 20 2009, 06:51 AM)

please give me some suggestions about my resume?

I would expect to see some sort of header with your name and possibly contact information.

[crelf]

QUOTE (ned @ Jan 20 2009, 10:26 AM)

- Spell LabVIEW with VIEW in capitals (that's the official name)

That's a really important one - it's a filter I use on resumes I get. If the candidate doesn't know the correct capitalization either they're lazy or don't know enough about lABview

[GSR]

QUOTE (ned @ Jan 20 2009, 04:26 PM)

A couple of really quick comments, although this probably deserves a more detailed reply:

- Spell LabVIEW with VIEW in capitals (that's the official name)

- You don't need to list your major when you've already given it with your degree (ie, no need to put both "Master of Science - Bioengineering" and "Major in Bioengineering")

- Remove "Programming" following names of computer languages in both your courses and skills sections. Similarly remove "Drawing" after CAD.

- Remove the skills section entirely, or at least make it much shorter. There's a lot of overlap with both your technical courses and your past experience. Use the experience section to highlight actual use of your skills. The two skills you list as "Expert" are not improving your resume. Do you really want to tell people that your strongest skills are "M.S. product" (did you mean Microsoft Office?) and browsing the web and downloading files ("HTTP,FTP")?

- Spell technique properly (it's not technic)

Very good suggestion, updated file also attached. thanks

QUOTE (crelf @ Jan 20 2009, 04:38 PM)

That's a really important one - it's a filter I use on resumes I get. If the candidate doesn't know the correct capitalization either they're lazy or don't know enough about lABview

Right. Thanks for your suggestions.

Any more suggestions?

BTW, I am watching BBC live now

QUOTE (TobyD @ Jan 20 2009, 04:34 PM)

I would expect to see some sort of header with your name and possibly contact information.

HAHA, I have them on my version.

Thanks for your remind

[mross]

QUOTE (zmarcoz @ Jan 20 2009, 10:49 AM)

HAHA, I have them on my version.

Thanks for your remind

The most recent copy had no header, but I think is wise not to expose your address and phone number to the public at large to prevent theft of your ID.

You wrote:

As a senior project, designed a microcontroller based hand print recognition system.

Change to:

Designed a microcontroller based hand print recognition system.

Reason:

A general rule (for resume writing - this is not proper English) is to start a sentence with an action word - a verb form when ever possible.

Also try to make every word relevant for the job to which you are applying. No one cares that you did the work as a senior project, therefore that is not relevant. What is relevant is that you designed something. You should consider a resume rearranged to highlight the most relevant information FOR THE PARTICULAR JOB TO WHICH YOU ARE APPLYING. That means you should write multiple resumes.

What you are doing with LAVA may be more useful to you than anything a job recruiter can do for you, more than the help wanted advertisements, and more than the online job search websites. Those three things are only responsible for about 30% of job placements. 70% of all jobs are found by networking as you are doing here. Interacting with people on a professional and personal level, and making sure they know what you can do and how to get in touch with you. You need business cards to hand out.

Another point then is that your interactions with sources of information like LAVA should be of the highest quality and exhibit the utmost professionalism. Your communication about your private life is probably best left unsaid.

I don't mean to be unkind, and I am sympathetic, but you must keep in mind that all the things you post to the internet are potentially reasons for you to NOT BE CONSIDERED FOR A POSITION. You are looking for someone to pay you a great deal of money - it probably costs $180,000 a year to sit a full time engineer down and put him to work. They need to believe they will get that much return on the investment, and a great deal more for the work you do. You may want to consider a less casual conversational tone when writing in areas related to your profession. Perhaps no one participating in this discussion will care about your casual tone, but you can not be certain, and you do want a job sooner than later. Correct?

And finally, realize that your worth is as an engineer first, and as the proficient user of a programming language second - or maybe third, or fourth. You should be selling yourself based on the quality of your professional experiences, your education, your communication skills, and your ability to solve problems. If you do not have engineering experiences to explain your value (you clearly do have useful experience), then you must be prepared to describe other experiences that show problem solving ability in the real world. And not trivial at all you must present yourself in a manner that demonstrates you can get along well with your coworkers and superiors, and that you will be an asset to them. Communication skills and "chemistry" with the prospective employer are very important to people looking to hire an engineer. We rarely have the exact experience that a job requires so, we must be able to learn quickly, make good decisions, and get along well with and enhance the abilities of our coworker.

You may wish to explore the intersection of neuroscience and psychology as a possible field where your experiences could be particularly useful. Your work with brain/machine interfacing and data collection, cognition and information handling by the brain, and your electrical engineering education could be very applicable to the burgeoning field of neuroscience. If that interests you, you may write me privately. I may have some ideas.

Good luck,

Mike

[jdunham]

I think you should get your resume onto one page. Others may disagree, but I think one only needs a multi-page resume with 10-20 years of experience AND several different jobs or skills. If someone could fit their professional 'snapshot' onto one page, but they choose not to, then I get several negative reactions:

• they don't care about saving me time/effort
  
• they can't tell the difference between important/useful stuff and the rest, so they've stuffed it all in.
  
• they can't present information in such a way that I can absorb it an a hurry (Remember humans only absorb 7±2 pieces of information at a time. The resume is your chance to get me to remember those about you)
  

It's not that I get insulted by those things, but I will suspect that those same things will happen on the job, should the candidate be hired.

I'm not trying to be negative on you. This is a very common problem with resumes.

I wouldn't put any 'negative' things down, like that your English is not as good as your Chinese. If your resume is in English, everyone will assume you have an adequate ability to use it in the workplace, so you don't need to clutter up the resume with it. Fluency in Chinese could be a real asset, so I would keep that, as long as you realize the reader will then assume that English is your second language.

Good luck!

[GSR]

QUOTE (mross @ Jan 20 2009, 07:28 PM)

You may wish to explore the intersection of neuroscience and psychology as a possible field where your experiences could be particularly useful. Your work with brain/machine interfacing and data collection, cognition and information handling by the brain, and your electrical engineering education could be very applicable to the burgeoning field of neuroscience. If that interests you, you may write me privately. I may have some ideas.

Good luck,

Mike

Thanks Mike

I just email you

[GSR]

QUOTE (jdunham @ Jan 20 2009, 09:48 PM)

I think you should get your resume onto one page. Others may disagree, but I think one only needs a multi-page resume with 10-20 years of experience AND several different jobs or skills. If someone could fit their professional 'snapshot' onto one page, but they choose not to, then I get several negative reactions:

• they don't care about saving me time/effort
  
• they can't tell the difference between important/useful stuff and the rest, so they've stuffed it all in.
  
• they can't present information in such a way that I can absorb it an a hurry (Remember humans only absorb 7±2 pieces of information at a time. The resume is your chance to get me to remember those about you)
  

It's not that I get insulted by those things, but I will suspect that those same things will happen on the job, should the candidate be hired.

I'm not trying to be negative on you. This is a very common problem with resumes.

I wouldn't put any 'negative' things down, like that your English is not as good as your Chinese. If your resume is in English, everyone will assume you have an adequate ability to use it in the workplace, so you don't need to clutter up the resume with it. Fluency in Chinese could be a real asset, so I would keep that, as long as you realize the reader will then assume that English is your second language.

Good luck!

Very good suggestion

Thanks

[Louis Manfredi]

Hi zmarcoz:

I agree with most all of the other comments, and join them in wishing you best results in your career search.

In particular, I agree that networking contacts are worth far more than trying to get a job through simply posting a resume or contacting a few recruiters. Just the same, the resume has to be near perfect, even if you make contact with a potential employer another way, they will be influenced, positively or negatively, when they see your resume.

Also, I think its important not to emphasize the programming tools, but what you are doing with the tools. Programming languages are just tools, like hammers. If you were a sculptor or a carpenter, you wouldn't write a resume about knowing how to swing a hammer, you'd write one about what kind of sculpture or carpentry you do. Perhaps you have a separate resume for your particular field, and the one you have shared with us is simply a back-up in case you have to apply to jobs outside of your field-- If so, and if you are anxious enough to find a job to take one outside of your field of work, this is fine. But if not, try to slant the resume more to what you've done and want to do, not the tools you use to do it.

In a similar way, your statement "presented my work in conference" is way weaker than it need be... If it were me, I'd say "Presented work on reaction injection molding of wind turbine blades at the 2004 AWEA conference." instead-- My field, not yours, but you get the point.

Finally, you always need a really good proofreader to go over any resume very carefully for grammar errors. True even if you are a native-speaker of the language, but even more so if not. For example, I think you mean , "Power Systems, Modeling Statistics, Probability theory"-- now what you have written. (Although perhaps I'm wrong on the last one, although I've never heard of it, it seems like there should be a field called Possibility Theory...) the proofreader has to be someone who is good at proofreading, who isn't afraid to risk offending you by pointing out the minor details (like the above) that are wrong, and who is willing to take the time to help you out. If you have a friend that is a journalism or English literature student, that friend might be a good choice.

Again, best results in the career search, my comments intended to help, not to criticize.

Best Regards, Louis

Edit: Fixed font size.

[GSR]

QUOTE (Louis Manfredi @ Jan 21 2009, 02:53 PM)

Also, I think its important not to emphasize the programming tools, but what you are doing with the tools. Programming languages are just tools, like hammers. If you were a sculptor or a carpenter, you wouldn't write a resume about knowing how to swing a hammer, you'd write one about what kind of sculpture or carpentry you do. Perhaps you have a separate resume for your particular field, and the one you have shared with us is simply a back-up in case you have to apply to jobs outside of your field-- If so, and if you are anxious enough to find a job to take one outside of your field of work, this is fine. But if not, try to slant the resume more to what you've done and want to do, not the tools you use to do it.

Very helpful. I am now rewriting my resume

[mross]

QUOTE (jdunham @ Jan 20 2009, 04:48 PM)

I think you should get your resume onto one page. Others may disagree, but I think one only needs a multi-page resume with 10-20 years of experience AND several different jobs or skills.

Our differences on preferred resume style demonstrate the near impossibility to please every resume reviewer.

I think your point is well taken for non-technical resumes, and people with limited relevant experience to the job description. On the other hand, I have read many resumes (though only for engineering positions), and I can't recall an interesting resume that was NOT two pages, or more. I can envision a person with five to ten years work experience that can fill one and a half or two easy-to-read pages with relevant information; relevant for me includes a meaningful objective or summary section, education, and so on. I tend to view graduate work and some undergraduate project work as work experience. Obviously, I am pretty forgiving about resume length.

Following is more WRT the original thread than a reply to Jason:

What I don't want to see is a pumped up resume - I am happiest when I see most relevant information at the top of the first page. No matter how thorough I want to be, by the bottom of the first page my attention maybe dropping. If I haven't seen things that interest me, the resume may be on its way to the wastecan. A two page resume is so common that I could be foolishly overlooking good candidates, if I was offended by that.

Personally, I would rather review an easy to read two page resume with a lot of white space than a one page resume with everything packed in. Other bad ideas are too small fonts and too dense information, no bullets, unexpected formatting from one section to another (be consistent), if there are any typographic errors the resume had better be extremely strong. I bet the vast majority of typos are in resumes not proofread by a third party. That is how they creep into my own resume. It can be so very hard to see clearly what you have written yourself.

Also, one resume for all jobs is a bad idea. Taking the time to make the resume highlight experience directly related to the job description is the best thing to do. Plan on writing and rewriting a resume many times. I think I spent a minimum of 30 hours on each the three types of resume I use - the first time I wrote them. I will always review and rewrite to make sure I am not missing an opportunity to make pertinent experience easy to notice.

[jdunham]

QUOTE (mross @ Jan 21 2009, 09:50 AM)

Our differences on preferred resume style demonstrate the near impossibility to please every resume reviewer.

I think your point is well taken for non-technical resumes, and people with limited relevant experience to the job description. On the other hand, I have read many resumes (though only for engineering positions), and I can't recall an interesting resume that was NOT two pages, or more. I can envision a person with five to ten years work experience that can fill one and a half or two easy-to-read pages with relevant information; relevant for me includes a meaningful objective or summary section, education, and so on. I tend to view graduate work and some undergraduate project work as work experience. Obviously, I am pretty forgiving about resume length.

Mike is right, the length is not a deal-killer. But relating back to the original resume, zmarcoz, your "courses" include. math, EE theory, electromagnetcs, circuit design. Holy smoke, you've got two degrees in EE. Of course you took those classes, so why are they cluttering up your resume and obscuring all the interesting stuff. I think you should take out the "Courses" section, and then under each Eductation item, put the 2 or 3 most interesting/unusual classes from your list.

I would consider the same thing with the skills, though some people like to see them listed separately. For me it's more interesting to see the context in which you used them, like when you say you used LabVIEW in your research project. The middlemen are just going to grep your resume for the right words with automated software, so they could care less where you list them. No one cares if you know Microsoft Office. If you can't learn it in 30 minutes, then there's a serious problem. If you're great at Excel Macros and VB for Applications scripting, you should mention that.

On to the Experience section: Prepared Course Materials, Supervised students, Evaluated and graded... - again all those are obvious, since you were a TA and all, and at the very least could be removed or combined into one item. I think each experience of yours could be condensed to 3 items, maybe 4.

With all that, you should be able to get your resume down to one page and still tell Mike an interesting enough story about yourself.

[GSR]

QUOTE (jdunham @ Jan 21 2009, 08:39 PM)

Mike is right, the length is not a deal-killer. But relating back to the original resume, zmarcoz, your "courses" include. math, EE theory, electromagnetcs, circuit design. Holy smoke, you've got two degrees in EE. Of course you took those classes, so why are they cluttering up your resume and obscuring all the interesting stuff. I think you should take out the "Courses" section, and then under each Eductation item, put the 2 or 3 most interesting/unusual classes from your list.

I would consider the same thing with the skills, though some people like to see them listed separately. For me it's more interesting to see the context in which you used them, like when you say you used LabVIEW in your research project. The middlemen are just going to grep your resume for the right words with automated software, so they could care less where you list them. No one cares if you know Microsoft Office. If you can't learn it in 30 minutes, then there's a serious problem. If you're great at Excel Macros and VB for Applications scripting, you should mention that.

On to the Experience section: Prepared Course Materials, Supervised students, Evaluated and graded... - again all those are obvious, since you were a TA and all, and at the very least could be removed or combined into one item. I think each experience of yours could be condensed to 3 items, maybe 4.

With all that, you should be able to get your resume down to one page and still tell Mike an interesting enough story about yourself.

Very good guideline, thanks

Thanks for everyone

I could not get any help when I was in school. Even if the staff in career department read my resume, she did not point out any problem.

By summing up all suggestions, I modified my resume. Now it is 20% shorter, and straighter to the point

Feel free to give me more suggestions :worship: <== the first time I see this icon, and it is very suitable to use it here

[Gary Rubin]

QUOTE (zmarcoz @ Jan 21 2009, 03:44 PM)

Even if the staff in career department read my resume, she did not point out any problem.

If your school was anything like my school, the career department probably did not have enough technical background or understanding to help science/engineering majors.

[Louis Manfredi]

QUOTE (Gary Rubin @ Jan 21 2009, 04:04 PM)

If your school was anything like my school, the career department probably did not have enough technical background or understanding to help science/engineering majors.

--Be that as it may, no excuse for them not finding out-and-out grammar errors!

zmarcoz:

I have given the latest version of your resume a quick read (I didn't have time to proofread closely). But based on the kind of quick read I would give a resume if I were hiring someone, this version is much better, gives a much clearer picture of who you are, of why someone might want to choose you over other applicants and reads much more smoothly. Probably room for further improvement, but at least to my eye you are heading in the right direction.

Best, Louis

[GSR]

QUOTE (Louis Manfredi @ Jan 22 2009, 02:30 PM)

--Be that as it may, no excuse for them not finding out-and-out grammar errors!

As a non native speaker, I really don't know how long will it take for a native speaker to read 2 pages

The staff in the career department spent no more than 15 secs to read my resume

Since I read so many times, I could not find out any other problem myself (I am weak to find the "s" problems)

I thought they were professional and could read my resume in very high speed;

I also thought my proof reading was good enough.

Therefore, my resume has so many mistakes

Thanks so much for reading my resume

[Louis Manfredi]

QUOTE (zmarcoz @ Jan 22 2009, 11:24 AM)

As a non native speaker, I really don't know how long will it take for a native speaker to read 2 pages

The staff in the career department spent no more than 15 secs to read my resume

A skilled proofreader, in their native language, can work pretty quickly- but not two pages in 15 seconds. (I don't really think its possible to do a thorough proofreading job in less time than it takes to read the document aloud.