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Just curious......I am waffling back and forth on whether or not to just put in company names to peak some interest for those that read my online profile or have it set up as a mirror image of my resume.....

Thoughts?

pmoriarty's picture
Training Badge

Mine's pretty close.

iann22's picture

Mine is pretty close too. And I do include company names.

BJ_Marshall's picture
Licensee BadgeTraining Badge

I have more bulleted accomplishments on LinkedIn than I have on my resume. I cull some bullets out to tailor my resume to a specific opening. LinkedIn seems more open-ended, so I don't do much culling.

Cheers,
BJ

HMac's picture

Agreed - I saw no reason to remove stuff for Linked-In. I actually use the "Objectives/Profile/Expertise" sections on LinkedIn - to include the stuff I cut out of my MT style resume...I've gotten some inquiries because of LinkedIn.

stephenbooth_uk's picture

Pretty close.

I'm currently in the process of converting to an MT style resume so I'm copying and pasting role descriptions across as I go. I'm having real issues trying to translate what I did in my roles into achievements as most of my role was doing the same things to different projects. For example one of my roles is as:[quote]December 1999 to June 2004: Client Server Analyst/Technical Analyst, Birmingham City Council - Provide support and technical consultancy to projects. Investigate, evaluate, recommend and procure solutions to technical needs. Install and configure Sun Servers from bare state to fully configured including installation and configuration of Solaris, Oracle and applications. Size and create databases using Oracle RDBMS. Support Oracle databases for projects from initiation to Go-Live and hand over to production 1st and 2nd line support teams. Advise hardware, storage, network, OS and applications support teams on matters relating to projects. Provide 3rd line support to production systems. Manage test lab environment.
• Created and maintained Database Security Standards document
• Introduced open source products to replace commercial products in a variety of projects achieving significant costs savings totalling over £1million[/quote]

Not much to show for four and a half years. My time in that role was very much of the "vital but small cog" character. For comparison, for my current role (which I've been in less than a year) I've been able to identify 6 achievements.

Stephen

jhack's picture

Saved over a million pounds - sounds like a real accomplishment to me!

Shorten the role description ("Specify, procure, install and maintain X number of Oracle and Sun systems").

make your bullets stronger:

- Reduced costs by over 1 million pounds by introducing open source...
- Maintained uptime over 98% (or whatever)
- No security breaches due to standards my team established.

Or something like that.

John

HMac's picture

Hey Stephen - First, I'd reorder the bullets (you're "burying the lead") and sharpen it up - rewrite it so the savings of more than a million pounds is in the first three or four words of the bullet, rather than being at the end...

Over 1 million in cost savings created by introducing open source products

Now, to cut into the job description a bit:

Investigate, evaluate, recommend and procure solutions to technical needs.

[i]Anything quantifiable (other than 1 MILLION IN SAVINGS!!!)?[/i] :lol:

Install and configure Sun Servers from bare state to fully configured including installation and configuration of Solaris, Oracle and applications.

[i]Did you do this faster or more efficiently than expected? With less expense?[/i]

Size and create databases using Oracle RDBMS.

[i]Again, anything about speed, efficiency - or were the databases in any way particularly useful or remarkable?[/i]

Support Oracle databases for projects from initiation to Go-Live and hand over to production 1st and 2nd line support teams

[i]Did the Go-Live go well? Were there fewer gliches than normal? Or fewer than in similar situations?[/i]

Advise hardware, storage, network, OS and applications support teams on matters relating to projects.

[i]Was there anything remarkable in your advice, or innovative in how you gave it? Can your advice be traced to reduced downtime, fewer errors, quicker responses?[/i]

Provide 3rd line support to production systems.

[i]Was this line support necessary? That is, did you reallly do anything in this task that is worth noting?[/i]

Manage test lab environment.

[i]Anything interesting about this?[/i]

Here's an interesting observation that's just occurring to me (so watch out - it's half-baked at best...):

[color=darkblue][b]Describing the job shouldn't take longer than describing your accomplishments while in the job.[/b][/color]

What do I mean? If you've got a multi-sentence paragraph describing the details of your job, and only a bullet or two to prove how well you did it, your resume is going to read more like a job description, and less like a compelling case for why I should interview you.

In this case, you might well find after you've really given thought to quantifying/verifying how well you did each of those elements, you may end up combining or eliminating some of them from the description.

I'll admit this is a little bit challenging for us - but if you can't prove how well you did something, you have to question whether you should include it at all. It's another one of those "balancing acts" we managers face every day!

Cheers.

stephenbooth_uk's picture

[quote="jhack"]Saved over a million pounds - sounds like a real accomplishment to me![/quote]

Thanks. This was over something like 50 or 60 projects, over 4.5 years, so probably represented less than 1% of total project budget. Saving per project was small, a few thousand or tens of thousands, but it adds up

It was fairly simple stuff like the initial recommendation would be for WebSphere and I'd investigate and point out that we didn't need the features of WebSphere and could get away with Apache and TomCat (which we already had in use so no 'New Product' training costs) so saving money both on not having to procure WebSphere and on being able to use less powerful hardware, or at least having more head room for growth on the hardware we had.

Stephen

jhack's picture

And that's the power of the power of the MT resume: the interviewer asks about the savings, and you [i]describe yourself doing the job![/i]

John