I recently added a few pages at the end of my résumé to detail some big wins or forays into areas that are important to an employer.

Why?

Sometimes there just isn’t enough room on the to describe the full breadth of your accomplishments for a particular role (presumably your current one). Instead of completely reworking my résumé to overweight my current role, I think it’s best to add that to the end of the document and simply reference it as a bullet under your current role.

My Résumé

I use a bit of a different format for my résumé that seems to work well. Let’s walk through it.

Header – same across all pages. I don’t really like reading résumés that include the candidates full address, but if you want to be deliberate about noting your locale (for a non-local opportunity), I’d recommend simply City, State or City, Country. People reading your résumé do not need to know precisely where you live and they can potentially infer other things about your home address (long commute, may not be immediately available for hands-on for datacenter, etc.). Mine is simply Name, phone number, email address.

Relevant Skills Summary – this should be a listing of all of your relevant skills to a particular role. It is not necessarily very helpful to know that a candidate has years of Cisco experience and proficiency when applying for a web development role. This section should be very deliberately populated. I recommend having a template résumé where you have all of your skills and proficiencies available and trim it down for each role. This is way easier than writing it from scratch each time.

A non-technical person should be able to match up the requested skills/experience in a job description to a line or item on your résumé. Remember: a (typically) non-technical recruiter will need to be able to match things on your résumé to the job description to consider you for a role. Make it easy for them. (I’ve referred recruiters back to this section before because it answered some of the exact questions they were asking me.)

Professional Experience / Accomplishments – this is where you list what you did. This should not read like a job description but more like an annual review: a list of accomplishments, time/money saved, collaboration efforts, etc. In general, do not just list things that you were responsible for.

Also, you should generally shorten the list of accomplishments for past roles the farther back in your work history you go. For example, I list seven items for my current job and for my first job, I only list four. You can even consider generalizing the position if it was early in your career (in direct contrast to my “do not just list things you were responsible for” rule above). You most likely will not be sized up for candidacy based on your earliest job duties or accomplishments.

I’m a strong believer in the bullets for each role being of the form:
Action word + thing ( + reason/end goal) e.g. Secured remote access via iptables to prevent brute force or rogue ssh connection attempts.

Education – if you have a degree, you should usually list it since it can only help you. Hiring managers like folks from diverse backgrounds and even if your degree is in a non-relevant field, it shows that you have interest outside of the subject area for the job. That’s a good thing.

If you are early in your career, it should probably be early on in your résumé, but if you have more than, say, ten years of experience, I’d recommend moving it after your professional experience section. It is not nearly as important as your experience and accomplishments the farther you are in your career. An exception here would be a graduate degree in a relevant field.

Coursework – list any coursework or training you’ve completed (unless wildly irrelevant to your current field) and include any professional certificates, even if only tangentially relevant.

Other – I’m a fan of having a list of personal accomplishments that may make you more interesting of a candidate. For example, if you play a musical instrument, you can note that here (bonus if you have a cool performance you can reference e.g. Accomplished violinist – performed at local “Solo and Ensemble” competition 2012). Participated in any sort of physical endurance test or race? List that. This is also a great place to highlight any community involvement you may have.

The Boost

Talk to any car enthusiast who owns a vehicle with a turbo and they’ll gladly talk to you about boost. It refers to the increase in pressure to the engine which enables it produce a lot more power.

The boost here is adding a page or two of your other accomplishments either for your current role or a more recent role that you want to highlight, but not listed under those roles in the professional experience section. It is a great place to use buzzwords but you will need to describe what those mean with regards to what you did. Here are some suggestions.

Cloud – highlight something that you’ve done in a cloud environment that wasn’t simply clicking boxes or following a guide. If you spun up an EC2 instance or group of instances? What else did you do? This needs to read like a checklist of things you buttoned up, not like a free-form paragraph.

Automations – if you created any automations, list those and what they do. Extremely well though-out automations are great conversation pieces in an interview and can demonstrate a ton of understanding beyond the technical requirements for a particular thing. Automations can tie into business needs, and ultimately, if you can solve problems for the business, you are a huge asset to an organization.

Custom scripts/frameworks – did you patch together something from scratch to do something cool or useful? Detail it here and describe the use-case and how it worked. (Note: you don’t need to be a self-described scripting god or goddess to be able to talk about something you did here; it could even be copied and pasted from other scripts you found online).

APIs – if you have used the command-line to parse information from an API or used an API to perform bulk actions, you definitely want to describe it in your résumé. In my world, APIs exist to allow me to do things that I know I want to do that may be beyond the scope of what the actual website or application offers. In nearly all cases, I had to use an API to solve a problem that would have been largely untenable or impossible to do through the application or web interface.

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Just adding those last two pages has been a boon for callbacks recently. At worst, it allows hiring managers to see much more of what you are able to do in a particular role (and doesn’t make your professional experience section too wordy and long. I think this will greatly help someone with a decent amount of experience stand out from a crowd, especially if you can directly link it to some of the technologies and issues that the company lists in the job post. And bonus points if you can tie it to something that will help the company at that stage of growth (assuming they are growing).