Career Switcher Uses THIS TRICK on their Developer Resume!

Does this career switcher resume have what it takes for them to get switched over into software development? Let's find out. Hi, my name is Nick Cosantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. Welcome to the résé review series where I review the rums that you submit. In this video, we're going to be reviewing a ré of a career switcher. And if you're new to this series, no, this will not be a résé roast. It's not just going to be me saying very nice things about the resume. I am going to try and find a balance about the things that I think they're doing well and the opportunities for improvement. So, if that sounds interesting and you'd like the opportunity to have your resume get reviewed, you can submit it to résumé[email protected]. With that said, let's jump over to this resume and talk about a little bit of background from this individual. As I mentioned, this individual is transitioning into software engineering. So, they're already working professionally, but in a totally different realm. So, we'll see on their work experience what they're doing. The other thing that I wanted to call out is that they didn't share with me specifically what types of software engineering roles they're looking for. I think based on what we might see on their resume, I might suspect that they're looking for something that is in front-end web development, but you know, that's going to be something that they might have to try and tailor their resume for. Let's start by going through the structure. This is a one-page resume. I think they've done a good job in keeping it concise. I think the format is uh working well for them because for me when I look at this it seems organized. It's easy to read. They have sort of the primary sections that I would hope to see even though they are going to be switching into likely a junior developer role. They listed out their work experience at the bottom of the resume down here. So that's really good. But we have a little summary at the top, a brief technical skills up at the top. they've called out they have like a coding experience section which is going to be you know all of their projects and stuff that they've been working on that aren't necessarily uh in professional software development. They have their work experience and then a little section for education. The other thing that you might not be able to tell because I have a lot of it redacted but across all of these projects they do have links to things and they have some links up at the top. So, I think from a resume perspective, really like the format of this, easy on the eyes and the bolding draws my attention to, I think, the parts that they're trying to get me to focus on. So, overall, that's a good start. Let's start by going through the work experience. Okay, so I like going into that first. So, they have work experience called out. And I think that for a lot of people that are doing a career switch, right, sometimes people get in their head of like, well, I want to start applying for software jobs, but like I don't have any software development like experience professionally, so like it sucks. I don't have anything I can put on my resume. Like this person ended up listing projects. That's great. But sometimes people just omit their professional experience even if it's not in software development. And I think that's a big no no. I think if you have other work experience, absolutely call it out. If it's not totally obvious and maybe it's not for a lot of people, I think there's a lot of learning that happens for everyone as they're getting into their first sort of job, right? Their first career um sort of move. And I've had this experience working with engineers at Microsoft. I've been doing early in career mentorship for every year that I've been at Microsoft. And I think that it's really important for people to spend time just trying to learn how to like navigate working in teams, trying to understand how promotions and stuff work. There's so much learning that goes into just getting your first job and being able to call out some of these things like interacting with other teams and how you're navigating projects. Those are all very very transferable skills. And I think that if you have some of those, call them out from your prior work experience. So, awesome job being able to do that. I think what's really cool about this person's experience, if we start by checking out here, uh, built automation tool with Google Appcript and Google Sheet, their role is not doing any programming specifically, right? So, customer success digital executive and assistant platform specialist, but they were doing some automation and stuff and I think that's really cool. They did call out that there was a productivity boost. So I see boosting productivity by 11x. I think they have the right idea here with trying to call out impact. I will kind of nitpick on this one. A productivity boost of 11x. What does productivity mean? I think like if we want to talk about this that sounds cool. 11x productivity increase sounds like pretty insane, right? But what does that actually mean? Like does that mean that you went from you know something taking you know uh some small amount of time to just uh even smaller amount of time or was it like we're saving hours across like how many people? I think being able to articulate this a little bit more clearly is helpful. The reason I'm calling this out is because I have to guess at what that means. It sounds very impressive, but when we're talking about resumes, you don't want the reader to have to guess at anything because if you're like, oh, like productivity boost of 11x, like that's going to be awesome. Like, it is awesome, but I also don't know what it means. So, take a little bit of time to try and articulate that more clearly. I think there's probably something really awesome there. So, that's good. I like that they called out that down here they were able to do collaboration with front-end developers in terms of like some AB testing. So in their role, they're having these interactions with development teams. This is a good call out when you're talking about a role that isn't about developer experience because you are talking about interfacing with those teams means you have more exposure to those types of interactions like those stakeholder conversations. So I think that's a really good thing to call out and the other thing that they called out too is provided user training created product relevant content and documentation. Look like it's not writing code and that's okay. It's not building you know a product or a service and that's okay. This kind of stuff can be helpful experience for other types of roles. So I am very happy that this person included this type of stuff in here because I think that that is transferable in some ways. So good job on that. The other thing that I wanted to call out as an opportunity here, it's kind of like the productivity boost by 11x. The other thing that they've done where they've bolded the impact, again, right idea, but I think maybe uh not the most effective metric. So, five endto-end data collection projects. So, we're counting projects. We're here counting support tickets uh and here counting. Again, the reason that I don't think that these are sort of helpful metrics is I think that they are like a proxy to some type of impact. What I mean by that is like you're using a count to try and qualify or quantify I guess specifically the type of impact you were having, but I still don't know what that impact is. So to give you an example what I mean just to I'm reviewing this resume. I don't know this individual. They worked at this job from July 2021 and were uh you know sort of still at the beginningish of 2025. So let's just do some rounding here. Okay, so if they worked all of 2022, all of 2023, and all of 2024, they've worked at least three years there, probably closer to four based on the math. I'm just not doing it all, but at least three full years. And then if we round this one down to 100 support tickets, that's like what are we saying? That that's like 33ish tickets a year. Like I don't Is that good? I don't know. Does that mean that you're doing less than one ticket per week? I don't know. Like I don't know what type of impact that is and if that's good. Is that uh good in this role or is like is the expectation that someone should be getting 10 tickets done a day? I don't know. instead of just counting things because I think that that might be maybe how internally it was done or maybe you were unable to come up with how you can quantify the impact. I think we have to go back to the drawing board a little bit on this and then try to come up with impact in a different way. For example, this one down here is talking about the number of support tickets and then they say from different markets, right? So the these are different geography. So that's cool. So like I think that's the call out that we want to make and maybe you could talk about how your work in those areas like drove progress. So I think by calling out the number of tickets I'm not really getting an idea of like the wording on this is going to sound harsh but like why I should care about that. That's the um sort of the framing that I use for every line on your resume is why should I care about any single line that you have written here when I read handled 110 support tickets from these different geographies by providing technical solutions on Google marketing platform right so this line right here why should I care about this that you have written here am I caring about this part because I don't know how to make sense of that am I caring about this part that seems kind of interesting because you're talking about working across different geographies providing technical solutions. Okay. And then specifically on Google marketing platform. So this part is almost like it's almost taking away from the rest of the statement because I don't understand why I should care about that. You need to be able to articulate that to the reader so that they have full context. If you're like, you know, if you're going to try to write down like, oh, like, you know, um, 50 tickets in that period of time would have been good. So 110 tickets is like absolutely extraordinary. That's still kind of like a confusing thing to say. So I would try to figure out how else you quantify that impact. Again, it's tricky when I make these videos because my intention is not to try and say, therefore, I don't think this person had impact. I think that they probably did have great impact, but I'm not able to understand it fully just from reading the resume. So, go back to the drawing board on how you want to communicate that because it should feel very obvious to someone who doesn't even understand necessarily the details of the job. That would be my uh piece of feedback on that section. Overall, I think good for the work experience. Just a little bit of like refactoring on that. Quickly on the education section, yes, they have it included here. No, I don't personally think that you must have education called out, especially if you don't have it. Not the end of the world. Some roles and uh places will sort of uh require you or they have it listed in the job requirements. I would say honestly, if you don't have, you know, some roles will say must have a bachelor's in computer science. Some of the roles that I see for my level enroll are like, you know, must have a bachelor's, but like also if you had a master's or PhD, that would be like even better. I don't know anyone specifically that like is just doing better at being an engineering manager by having a PhD personally, but you know they have that in I think it's just kind of like this legacy thing that's left over a lot of the time especially uh when people are just trying to filter out the volume of resumes by setting the bar. The other thing that catches people is that this education is not computer science. It's not computer engineering. It's not software engineering. It's Bachelor of Social Sciences. Does that mean like, oh, not relevant. You shouldn't include it. No. Absolutely include this. If you have it, include it. If you have certificates and stuff, include them. I think the more the better on this type of thing because it is education that you you have formally. So, I would include it even if it's not specifically software development. Let's jump up to the projects. I think on someone who is doing a career switch or if you're going to be new into software development, I think hopefully I would hope for most people that your side projects section is going to be the thing that is going to be the highlight of your resume because you don't have that prior work experience in the software industry. Yes, in this person's case, they do have some prior experience because they are doing a career switch. It's just not in software development. So, this is going to be where you show off what you've been trying to do to scale up as a software developer. I think they've done a great job here. They've got four projects. We have a mix of both solo and group projects. So, you can see solo solo here. This one's a group project. And then here is also another solo project. So, awesome job on that. I do think that it's good that they have some call outs for um AI mixed in. And if we look down here, so built-in interactive ASL learning platform that uses webcam input and a self-trained AI model to detect hand gestures in real time. So this is super cool because a lot of the AI stuff that we're seeing now is like I call into chat GPT. Not that that's bad or not useful, but like it's becoming like you know the thing that you can check the box that you do AI, right? This is actually self-training and AI model. I haven't done that. That's super cool. So, I think that's interesting. That stands out. They have another one up here that's integrated co-pilot kit to provide users with AI assisted chatbot to search studios. This one's a little bit more of like a rapper kind of approach, but still I think having exposure to these technologies and leveraging them, great addition to the resume in terms of projects that you can list. I think the other thing that I want to call out is that this seems to be mostly focused on like I see like React and some front-end development right next.js and then they have one job or sorry one project that's called out that's a little bit more full stack. This is full stack but in a group I kind of get the feeling that they were doing some more of the front-end stuff but this one is full stack and solo. So we do see TypeScript, we see express, we see Postgress. So this individual is starting to work across the full stack at least in this project. So I think we have a good mix here. But what I would say in terms of how to improve this is it's going to depend on the types of roles that this person's interested in. Like I said at the beginning of this video, they did not share that with me. That's totally cool. I'm kind of speculating some front-end web development. Maybe they're going for full stack. If they are going for full stack web development, I would say, hey, maybe take the opportunity to build more full stack type things. Maybe get some more back-end focused included here. Not because I think that they don't have enough experience or it's bad or something, but it's right now to me seems like it's leaning more to front-end web development. Nothing wrong with that, but what kind of role are you after? So, the more that you can include doesn't mean that you necessarily have to go build more projects. take some of these, enhance them, talk about how you went deeper on these things. Like there's lots of opportunities, but like I said, it's kind of hard for me to sort of give advice on how to go tune this without knowing the direction they want to go in. If they are interested in front-end web development, I think they have a great start here. And I would say continue to focus on things like building out more projects, going deeper on some of these projects, picking up other technologies. I think having React, TypeScript, JavaScript really good. You might want even some more experience with different types of frameworks that you can at least have on your resume to say, "Hey, I know how to use this." But otherwise, you know, going deeper on React and that kind of stuff, I think can be a great option. So, I think that's a really solid start. The other thing that you may want to do in this type of position when you're going from a different type of career into software development is like, well, I don't do software development, right? I don't know where this group project came from, but how did that come about? Is there an opportunity where you can be networking, seeing if you can be building projects with people? Maybe that means going to a meetup, hackathon, something trying to create those opportunities so you can go build some stuff together with other people. Overall, I think this is an excellent start. I think the things that I'm critiquing here aren't major. I think a little bit of adjustment to the work experience, but overall, I think this is great. So, if you thought that was helpful, remember that you can submit your résumés to résuméser.ca for the chance to have it reviewed. And if you thought this video was helpful, remember to subscribe to the channel and feel free to share with others. Thanks, and I'll see you next time.