Irrelevant Work Experience is Wrecking Your Resume! Do This Instead!

Welcome to the résé review series where I review the rsums that you send in. My name is Nick Oentino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. In this réé review video, we're going to be looking at a more junior developers resume. They still have some work experience that they've added in that's not necessarily directly related to software development, but that's okay. And we're going to see how we can tweak and tune this, see what they're doing well and some areas that they can improve. Just a reminder in these videos, there's no roasting. We're not making fun of anyone's resumes. People have sent these in because they do want feedback. So, I'm going to do my best to be honest and I'm going to make sure that I can call out the things that I think are done well and areas to make better. That sounds interesting. Just a reminder, subscribe to the channel, check out that pin comment for my courses on dome train. And if you're interested in having your resume reviewed, send it in to résuméser.ca. Let's jump over and check this out. All right, so as I mentioned, they are a more junior level developer. I do like in general seeing some little summary at the top. This is just a personal preference. I think if you're able to give a little bit of background in a couple of sentences, that can be kind of nice before we get into the rest. This is, I think, especially beneficial if you have a more loaded resume. So, it may be less important as a junior, but like I said, personal preference for me. Skills section. I have said in other videos that I do like having a skills section if anything just to try and help call out some keywords, especially for certain companies that might be using keywords to help filter or even for humans when they're glancing through and they can say, "Okay, I see some of these keywords that's going to draw my attention in and maybe I can pick them up later throughout the resume." As we go on from that, we get into work experience and there's education and then some awards and achievement. So, the overall structure and ordering of this, I like this generally. I would say a quick comment on the skills section. A way to clean this up a little bit is just to maybe use some bullet points and maybe put it into some columns or something like that cuz the shape of this, it sounds like a minor piece of feedback, but it's kind of just a blob. And if you can structure it a little bit better, that might be easier on the eyes. When we get into this, I mentioned that in the beginning of this video that there are going to be some work experience callouts here that aren't necessarily related to software development. And I've said this in other videos, and I genuinely mean it, that there's nothing wrong with including other work experience. Generally, if you have some other work experience, there might be ways or opportunities to call out some of that experience in a way that can look helpful even in a development role. Now, I'm going to walk through this work experience. We're going to start with the actual software development part and then when we get into the other roles that they've had, we can see if there's anything that they maybe can change or if anything that they're doing there is a good fit on the resume. So to kick things off, their current position is in a sort of government position here. So they said developed a full stack web application or web applications sorry using ASP.NET. So net developer awesome best you know ecosystem to work in. No bias from my side, right? Constructed custom reports for clients utilizing device diverse software tools to ensure client needs were met effectively. When I read a sentence like this, um I don't know if they mean that they were the one producing reports as sort of like oneoff things or in terms of uh you know software development life cycle or if they mean they built software that can generate reports. So that would be something good to kind of call out because they imply different things. They say design bespoke client software solutions enhancing client engagement and satisfaction. In my opinion, this is a kind of word salad sentence and I'm just going to I'll come back to that in just a moment. And then experience utilizing Azure DevOps for version control. So when I start looking at this and try picking it apart again, it's not to make fun of anyone or to to you know my goal is not to hurt someone's feelings. I just want to see if we can start analyzing line by line and then if we look at it that way then we can see if there's ways to improve. So to give you an example, if we read the last line, experience utilizing Azure DevOps for version control, this sentence could basically be the same as them listing uh Azure DevOps up here in the skill section or version control or git or something like that. So, all that I'm saying when I read a sentence like this is that if you're looking for, you know, organization on your resume or to, you know, if you're just the goal of this sentence is to call out a skill, like if you have a section for that already, maybe that's where that goes. Otherwise, like if you're trying to call it out and highlight it here, the question I always go back to is like, why should I care as the resume reader, right? So getting the impression you know the idea is to say like hey look I've been working in a team I do understand Azure DevOps I understand the concept of version control which is great right there are some developers that don't get exposure to that I think probably many do especially with GitHub and stuff like that but getting that exposure is actually really helpful to be you know get up and running in a team is that the goal with this sentence or is there something else about this that they would like to call out I'm saying this out loud because for the person who sent this in. If you're seeing my response to this, like if you're going, "Oh, no. There was something more that I wanted the reader to get out of this." I mean, that's all that I'm getting. Not that it's a problem, just something to consider. When I read this one, I kind of said this was like a word salad kind of thing. Design bespoke client software solutions. This is custom software for clients. Okay. Enhancing client engagement and satisfaction. You know, there's nothing really measurable here. I don't really know what went into this. And one of the challenges with reading a sentence like this is that perhaps the person that wrote this and sent in the resume in their mind they're they're thinking of all this awesome work that they did. And I you know when I talk about this kind of stuff I would love to believe that right I'm sure that this person working for roughly you know just over 2 years at this place so all of 2023 all of 2024 yeah and you know some of 2025 so just over two years I'm sure they did some great work there. So when I read this, I don't understand any of that great work, right? It's kind of hidden from me. Sometimes I think people write sentences like this on their resume because it sort of evokes some of that thought for them and they're recalling some of these cool things they built, but I don't know any of that from reading that sentence. So it comes across as word solid to me because I don't know the detail. I would, you know, get this person to reconsider if they're reading this or they wrote it down and they're going, "Okay, like there was this project or this super cool feature I built and there was some cool challenges there." Go through that thought exercise and try sort of expanding that line into the more interesting details about it. This is kind of like a similar thing, right? Constructed the custom reports. So, utilizing diverse software tools to ensure client needs were met effectively. I said that I don't know if this is like one-off reports or you know software solutions for generating reports but if the goal is to say that you know I was able to create reports for stakeholders and things like that again what is the goal when you write a line like this I'm not saying that it's bad or it's wrong or anything like that but if we're trying to analyze this what is the goal of this line I believe this is to try and say one of a couple things it's either like I had good stakeholder engagement I understand the needs of the client in this case and I can work effectively communicate with them to get them the information they value or so that's like generating reports kind of oneoff sort of thing in the software development life cycle or it could look more like I built some interesting solution I built a system or a you know job framework that could go do report generation pulling data and stuff like that I don't know which one of those it is so I'm saying again that out loud so this person can reflect on that. And if you're someone who has maybe similar things written on their resume, I would try to go through this thought exercise. Like I said, you can send in your resume to me. I will try and review them. I'm a little bit behind on these, so I do apologize. This is sort of the nature of uh content creation. But you could do the same thing with a family member, with a friend, you know, someone who will give you some time and try to see genuinely what they think that you're trying to call out. If it's not obvious, right? If they give you a response and it's kind of like not really landing, that's okay, right? It's it's not like it's wrong or it's bad. It just might mean that you want to think of a different way to communicate it. So, overall, I think that there's a little bit of work that they can expand upon here, especially because they had most of their time at this one. The second placement they had, or I guess this is sort of like their first actual software development position, was an internship. So from May to July in 2022, solve network issues gaining hands-on experience with robust and fault tolerant network practices. That's pretty cool. I don't think that, you know, many software developers end up kind of getting to work necessarily specifically with networking. I think that's great understanding uh, you know, fault tolerant network practices, things like that. This can be helpful when you're thinking about scaling systems and things in the cloud because there might be some concepts even from smaller networks that are going to apply when you're thinking of things at scale. So, I think that's a great thing to call out. Supported clients and resolving point of sales issues efficiently, emphasizing minimal downtime and reliability. This is also an interesting one to call out too because I think that, you know, it is an IT internship depending on where you're applying to. Um, I think that some places like some teams will have perhaps more like relationships either with other internal stakeholders, which could be tech support. It could be that as developers that you have a little bit closer of a relationship with clients. This can look very different depending on where you're working. So, in my opinion, having a role like an IT internship where you can call out some things like this, right? like supporting um clients and things like that. Those are interesting sets of skills, right? Those are very interesting sets of skills that aren't necessarily like, you know, pure software development. Here's how I coded and built this, but they are I don't even want to say like peripheral. I think that they're excellent skills to have as developers. It's just that we often don't get to practice them depending on the work environment. So, in my opinion, I would try to lean into this one even more and see if you can sort of draw in more of those interesting experiences that aren't programming necessarily, but what else? Like when you were talking about working with clients, what did that look like? Is there more like specific things that you can call out and highlight from those types of interactions? Right. Engage in functional device programming and web uh programming task honing skills in JavaScript. Talk more about this. Right. This was an IT internship. You were able to do some programming in JavaScript, functional device programming. Cool. Like I don't when I read this, I don't know what you did. It's not that it's bad experience or something like that. I just can't tell what you did. So maybe expand upon this a little bit more. I know that you were working in JavaScript, but I see functional device programming and I see web programming. So like tell me like split that into two and tell me the things that you were building or enhancing. That could be very interesting. To kind of wrap this resume up though, I did mention at the beginning there's going to be some job experiences on here that aren't necessarily like programming related, right? In my opinion, if we look at the shape and kind of structure of this resume, how much experience they have, it would be if they just took out these two jobs, the one that says lawn care and Lowe's Hardware, if they took these two out, their resume would be quite light, right? And I know that they're a junior and that's okay. You know, everyone has to start somewhere. you have to build up that experience. In my opinion, especially we're around the one page mark. What I would try to encourage this person to do is if we can, I would try to look at side projects and build up things on the side so that you can replace these ones. And the reason I say that is because in the other videos when I talk about job experiences and like you know career switchers and things like that, I don't think there's anything wrong with including different work experience, but you do want to see if you can find ways to make it relevant. Okay? So for example, if we see lawn maintenance and landscape assistant, on the surface with this, you might say, well, there's absolutely nothing remotely related to programming here. Why would this person ever do it? Okay, but we see a couple of things. Uh, routine lawn maintenance tasks and provide assistance to landscapers. So I wonder are there ways that this person could expand upon different things with teamwork, accountability, in terms of planning in term like could you talk about these things that are maybe um you know software adjacent but from the perspective of this work experience right I totally understand it's lawn maintenance that isn't programming that's okay but what what could you highlight from that if you're going through this exercise and the answer is like really nothing I can't think of anything, I would strongly consider trying to push it off the resume and try including more things like projects. And you'll hear me talk about projects a lot when it comes to résumés, especially as beginners. The reason why is that if you don't have lots of previous experience, like if you're not sitting there with a big resume that's like three or four pages trying to cut things down to get it to like one or two or something like that, you probably want to be creating more experiences for yourself. Or you want to be looking at your existing work experience and really trying to highlight the juicy parts. So, if you have a one-page resume and we're already talking about trimming potentially some things off, projects could be a great opportunity. Now, what projects? Well, what field do you want to work in? What areas are of interest to you? What technologies do you need to practice more to be able to showcase that you have some experience with that? I think there's so many directions that you could go with this. But that would be my, you know, one of my major takeaways here is to think about this uh the lawn maintenance work experience and see if we can start pushing in projects to sort of create that experience in a more related area and push these ones off. So overall, great start for an entry- level developer. I think that they have some expansion that they can do in their current work and I think that if they take some of these points to heart, I think that they can do an awesome job just kind of expanding upon this. So, thank you very much for the person for sending this in. And I'll mention it one more time. If you're interested in having your resume reviewed, you can send it into résumés at devleader.ca. Thanks so much for watching and I will see you next time. Take care.