From The Army to Software Developer - Let's Review This Resume!

All right, this soon to be graduate has a resume that we're going to be going through together today. They have some previous experience in the army, which is really awesome. And I think that they're really on the right track with putting some of their experience together on their resume. So, we'll go through that. We'll see what they might be able to improve in terms of adding more experience and kind of boosting this because obviously we know it's really challenging to get into the industry. But like I said, I think they're on the right track here. So, friendly reminder that if you're interested in having your resume be reviewed, you can submit it to résumé[email protected]. And no, I don't do ré roast. I'm not making fun of anyone. We're going to talk about the things that I think that they're doing well and any opportunities to improve. That does mean constructive criticism as it comes up, but at no point am I intending to make fun of anyone or anything like that cuz people submit these, they're looking for my feedback, and I want to give them something valuable. So, let's jump over to this resume and check it out. as someone who is an aspiring developer in terms of their professional career. This is going to be light, right? They are still in school. They're going to be graduating at the end of the year here. So, you know, one page, nothing wrong with that, right? So, I have mentioned this in other videos, but when we're talking about work experience and kind of transitioning from one career into another, if you have previous experience, put it on your resume, right? If you don't have, you know, previous experience in a software developer role, still put it on your resume because there's going to be things that you might be able to call out that can be really helpful in terms of the overall flow of this cuz I like talking structure first. Leading with work experience. Great. Right. And they have some of their most recent developer experience even though it's as a student developer right at the top. Awesome stuff. Then they go into their previous uh army and military experience. Again, not related to development. No problem. Then they have projects. So great, we're seeing projects being shown here. Then they have their education and then some of their skills and technologies at the bottom, which I think is a great strategy for anyone, especially if we're trying to highlight some keywords. Let's switch over. So we have some highlighting uh here in the PDF if it wants to work, but it looks like it's just not going to do it. So that's okay. Um I will try to be a little bit more verbose as I talk through it. If we go up to the work experience, right? So starting off as a student developer, they say on a full stack application helps administrators allocate resources. Cool. So an idea what's being put together here. And then they're calling out the technology as they're going through, which I think is good. I've talked about this in previous videos. You can have a separate section like they do. That's totally fine. But I still recommend trying to show the technology choices as you're going through your work experience so that the reader of the resume has an idea like just how much exposure to some of these things you have. So just a small note designer implemented relational database structure and built over 80% of the restful API endpoints. Great. Right. So some some majority ownership over some API surface and they've done uh some of the uh database backend. So kind of touching on both ends of this web app structure here. Row to data access layer using the unit of work pattern. Okay. So calling out some design patterns with entity framework core. Again technology call out support efficient and testable API operations. Great. Created comprehensive unit test suite with 100% coverage of API endpoints. This is the kind of thing that like obviously with more and more experience like you know calling out 100% test coverage like not a you know not a huge thing to add but I think at this point in time being able to talk about some of these things as they're doing I think it's a great thing to do. So I wanted to mention this because as your resume evolves with work experience you have more and more things to add. This is the kind of thing where you might be able to say in the future like created a comprehensive test suite and talk about technology, talk about like the benefit that that test suite brought, but being able to say for now like 100% of uh coverage for API endpoints, I think that's great. Ensuring code reliability and maintainability. So kind of piecing these things together. I graduated from university and hadn't written any tests, right? And I had 5 years of computer engineering and I didn't write any tests for anything, right? Just just how it went. I don't know why. That's something they didn't cover in school for us for some reason. Seems kind of important, but you know. So I'm reading this and going great. This person's already graduating with some idea of this in mind. Awesome stuff. Create a backend process uh for city administrator can pre-register via Azure B to C. Built encrypt functionality for web app settings with user interface. Again, technology call out. Uh, and then another dedicated little technology call out right at the bottom. If they were to keep building out more work experience in this format, I think this is great. The thing that they'll have more and more ability to demonstrate is like the impact of their work. Of course, right now they're still quantifying some of these things like they're talking about the 80% of RESTful API endpoints. Awesome. Their code coverage awesome. So, I would just say, you know, as you're putting more work experience down on here, trying to quantify your impact is a huge uh value ad. Let's jump over to their non-development experience because I think personally based on what this person has for their experience in their non-developer aspect of their career, there is probably so much more that they can call out. And I wish my highlighter was working right now and it's not. But if we look at the US Army part, I just wanted to mention like from 2004 to 2018, right? That's I mean depending on the time of year and everything, it's roughly 14 years. That's 14 years of work experience in the army. And we can see progressed from junior officer to senior unit level, managing teams of up to eight direct reports, planning, coordinating, executing all aspects for aviation training for units of over a 100 personnel. This is huge. This is a huge accomplishment. Okay. And that line alone, right, that line alone tells me that especially over a 14-year window, there is probably so much more that this person can call out, but they might not be doing it because it might not seem relevant to a software developer role because it's not talking about programming languages and tech stacks and stuff like that. But this could be such a huge benefit and an asset to call out on their resume by being able to talk more about some of their leadership. Talking more about planning, coordinating like we see just across these two lines here, right? Planning, coordinating, executing. The next part says that they planned and commanded missions involving the integration. Uh have some stuff redacted here. Assets and direct support of special operations, right? So planned and commanded then planned, coordinating and executing. These are like really involve things that cover a lot of ground from being upfront you know in the planning phase coordinating and then actually executing on things. If you kind of uh remove yourself from like the army aspect of this, if we think about software development like as someone who's managing teams like I have to go through planning, I have to go through coordinating and working with different stakeholders, different teams, different roles and then I work with my engineers to execute on things right. So when I am writing stuff on my resume as a manager, I have a bunch of things related to planning, coordinating and executing. This person has not been a professional software developer because they're still in school and they have student developer experience, but they're going through a lot of things that could still be very very applicable in software development because software development is much more than just writing code. My number one takeaway for this person would be to go through their US Army experience and this other one that I have redacted here where they're talking about uh aviation operations, right, in including inspection flight operations. These these two different work experiences seem like they have nothing to do with software development because on the surface they're not software development but the actual process planning coordinating executing being able to u mentor other people teach other people right all of these things teamwork collaboration these are hugely beneficial in software development and I just want to give you sort of this this idea to kind of take away from this imagine another individual who had you know similar sort of tenure in school right so they're about to graduate you know they have like like this individual they have one project listed their student developer experience is very similar right they have some car some full stack development some some React so some stuff in the front end if you have these two individuals okay and then you have someone who has all of these years of experience actually being able to collaborate coordinate team environment like across the two roles here. That's like 17 years of experience in a professional setting. Like I just think that there is so much to be able to take away from this that could really if you're comparing two individuals that are sort of entry level here. You have so much more experience to be able to draw upon and say like yes, I've worked in these types of environments. I've seen these types of things. I've worked on like, you know, things with deadlines, stuff like that. Coordinating uh maybe not directly. I mean, they do say managing teams of up to eight direct reports, right? There there's a lot involved in doing that. So, I just think that there is so much more that this individual could call out across these two these two jobs. I want that to be a reminder for you watching this. If you're someone else who's a career switcher and you're like, "Okay, like I I want to kind of juice up my resume with as much developer experience as possible, great. I understand that." Because my usual sort of go-to would be, hey, like go to your project section. And again, I can't highlight, but go to your project section, try to call out as much as you can or like do work on side projects working on different technologies, kind of showcase that you're learning these things. That's my go-to. Usually, I would tell people if you can't get that experience professionally yet, go create that experience. That still applies here. But in this person's case, and it might be very applicable for you watching this, if you have non-developer experience where you can talk about collaborating, managing, leading, working crossf functionally, project management, stakeholders, all these different types of things. These are all very relevant in software development. You can absolutely stand out against other individuals who are brand new, right? just like this person otherwise would be as a new graduate, you can really stand out against other individuals with similar sort of developer experience. So, um overall, I think this person's on the right track. I just like I said, I'm going to repeat myself. I would juice this part of the resume up where they're talking about their prior experience cuz there's so much more that they could call out. Overall, I think awesome job on the right track and I really like the structure. So, I think that they're doing all the right things. So, thank you so much for watching. Hope you found this helpful. And just a reminder, if you'd like the chance to have your resume be reviewed, you can send it into résuméser.ca. Thanks, and I'll see you in the next one.