How To Use Non Developer Jobs On Your Software Engineering Resume

Hi, and welcome to the résé review series where I review the résumés that you submit. My name is Nick Cosantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. In this video, we're going to be going over someone's resume who has a bit of work as a freelancer. They have some prior experiences that aren't necessarily software development almost looks like they were going down a different career path and then started seeing that software was a very interesting opportunity for them. So, I think this one will be a great one to go through together. I wanted to give a quick reminder that for these videos, it's not going to be roasting anyone's resumes. We're not making fun of them or anything like that. This is supposed to be constructive criticism and feedback. The people that send in their resumes are looking for my opinion on these things. So, I want to honor that. I want to make sure that I can call out the things they're doing well and the areas that I think that they can improve. That sounds interesting. Just a reminder, subscribe to the channel and check out that pin comment for my courses on dome train. A quick reminder that if you want your resume reviewed, you can send it into résumés.devleer.ca. Let's jump over to this resume and check it out. The structure of this resume starts off with a little intro. Something like a one or twoliner, I think, is great to introduce your experience and who you are. So, that's fine. Technical skills, I do like a little section like this for keywords and things like that. This one is organized well. In some other videos, I've talked about sometimes where people have them kind of just listed out like a big paragraph. This is at least a little bit more organized for my eyes to go over. Maybe for an automated system that doesn't really matter, but for a human helps to have some structure. We have education called out. So I did notice that they have healthcare administration, right? So seems like in my opinion if that's what the direction they were going down perhaps that some of their experience going into software development is going to look a little bit different. And that's totally cool. One of the great reasons that we can go through these resumes together is see that people have different walks of life when they're trying to get into software development. So then they also have a full stack JavaScript software engineer training academy call out here for their education. So great they did go invest additional time you know outside of school to be able to go get a little bit more training and brush up on some skills in terms of software development. In terms of the structure of this resume, one thing I want to call out is that I would move projects later on. Personally, uh I think that work experience is really important to call out near the top. So I would actually move uh work experience up where education is. Then I would put projects after the work experience. Then I would put education right towards the end to be honest. So quick thing because if I'm someone reading through resumes and I have a lot to go through, I want to get to the most important parts first and generally that's going to be prior work experience so I can see how you were operating in professional environments. From there, looking at projects and things like that tells me that if you don't have tons and tons of work experience, then maybe there's projects where I can see that you were investing time into learning new skills and technology. So, for me, those are the sort of sequences that I look for on rums. That's my personal opinion and that's my logic behind it. So, I'm going to jump down to the work experience first and then we'll go back up to projects. So, uh we see volunteer full stack engineer. So, they started that at the beginning of this year at the time of recording. This is in June 2025. So design and prototype front-end screens for React live streaming and donation platform using Miro and Figma to support the operation team's initiatives. Okay. Collaborated with project managers via Trello, right? So we get some insight into some of their sort of development life cycle. Uh working with other stakeholders like project managers. Uh you know system called out like I think this is a handy thing to call out. I like this because seeing some type of interaction with other stakeholders is helpful. Contributed to responsive design improvements across mobile, tablet, desktop to ensure seamless user experience. Okay, so this is all good stuff. Uh I think you know one of my things that I want to call out here is that when we're looking at different experiences, trying to quantify impact I think is helpful. I realize sometimes it's very hard. So that would be something that you know I don't know what this person has done or built specifically. So I would go back to them and say, "Hey, if you could go look at what you've written here, can you call out some of the impact, the resulting impact of the work you've done? Is there a way that you can sort of line that up here as well?" Um, the other thing when I'm reading through this is like I I don't have a totally concrete idea on exactly what they're doing, and that could just be me, so that's fine. But designed and prototype front-end screens for React live streaming. Okay. um I don't really I guess maybe I don't really know like the the scale of the system or anything like that right sometimes that can be really helpful to make sure that I have an understanding of like you know are you working in a brand new code base are you working on something that's up and running and has this been launched yet some things like that can be helpful and it's not that any one of those things is right or wrong but it's a little bit more detail right if maybe I'm looking just to give you an example maybe I want to see someone with the breadth of different experiences. So on their resume, if I can see like, hey, I started a green field project and I had opportunities to work on more legacy systems and things like that, it could be interesting for me to say, oh, this person has a breadth of experience that crosses all of these things. So look for little things like that to try and call out. I think that could help in terms of the volunteer experience. So I think that's cool, though. Freelance full stack web developer. Again, I think that this kind of stuff is great. I know that there's a lot of people out there that are looking for jobs. Of course, the job market's very tough right now, but being able to sort of, you know, go off on your own, try getting clients, this is a super challenging thing. I say this as someone who's been writing code for over 20 years to do freelancing. I would feel so uncomfortable because it's so many different skills that aren't just writing code. You have to market and sell yourself as well. So, I think that that's a really cool thing if you have experience like this to try and lean into some of those skills that go alongside that. So, you know, if you're doing consulting and freelancing work, you have to be working with stakeholders that are going to be customers, right? Those are your clients. Not many software developers in their entire career get exposure to directly working with customers. I think that there's a lot of really cool stuff that you could lean into with work like this. So if we read through this developed and launch custom mobile responsive websites and web applications. Okay. So for small businesses across five industries. So something that could be interesting here is like could we see the the breadth of different industries that might be helpful. I think that could be interesting and something that could add value if you're trying to apply into you know a certain job in a certain industry. They can say oh you know they worked or they did some work in a similar or like adjacent industry. That could be helpful, right? Just little things like that can help add a little bit more value into some of the sentences. Manage complete development life cycles from initial client consultations through deployment, which makes sense, right? If they're doing, you know, freelance work, handling requirement gathering, right? This this stuff is awesome. Requirement gathering, design, development, and launch phases while adhering to project timelines and budget constraints. This stuff like right here just to give you an example going through this sort of end to end is really complicated because if you think about software development teams there are sometimes there's roles like dedicated to helping organize some of this stuff. Sometimes it's multiple roles. So being able to do like a product manager is generally doing like the the user requirements interacting with customers and users to get that. You might have a project manager for coordinating. You might have uh you know the and the developers and the teams. You might have dedicated testers. This looks different everywhere, by the way. Sometimes it's all just in one spot. Point is that being able to successfully do this as a freelancer, I think, is awesome. And I think this is a really good call out to have on a resume because it shows that you have insights and understanding of these functional areas. So really cool. Um glad that they have it written out this way. developed e-commerce solutions by integrating clients Square and Clover systems. So, seamless online ordering, mobile payments. Again, this kind of stuff enabling seamless online ordering, mobile payments, like payments and stuff are uh not always straightforward. They can be some pretty complicated systems. So, that's like an interesting thing to call out. I think that's great. Which enhanced user convenience and drove increased sales through an optimized digital presence. So, again, if they had metrics on this, that could be kind of cool. But I think overall this type of experience is super interesting. What could help in here uh because I don't see it directly called out is like just to call it out up at the top. They have some of their technical skills and things like that. If they can, I would suggest trying to layer in some of that into this freelance work. So I could get an understanding someone reading this. What technologies were you working with when you were doing some of this stuff? If you can find a creative way to layer that in, I think that could be great. The other thing that I would mention is that this is from August 2022 to present. So that's basically, you know, to 2023 to 2024 to 2025. So just under three years. There's probably some very interesting challenges or creative solutions that they had to come up with. They did talk about like Square and Clover systems. Are there other things? You know, is there more that we can extract from this experience? because I think that when you do this kind of stuff like freelancing, there's probably some really cool stuff that you can showcase. It's my take on this one. If we go down through the rest, right, so their current position is health and safety operations lead at Walmart and then they have some other experiences before that, right? So, volunteer front-end developer and lead technician for business class cable installation. I like this resume as a talking point because I have talked about this either in other videos on social media that kind of thing where I think that it's helpful to be able to call out work experience even if it's not directly related to programming. The thing that you want to be able to do though is think about ways that you can highlight what's happening in that work experience that's at least adjacent. Right? So, to give you an example, the health and safety operations lead at Walmart. I'm assuming based on what's uh what I'm reading here, there's no coding at this job. That's not the end of the world, though. Health and safety operations lead. Operations lead. We can see that they were developed and implemented new workflow systems, operational productivity, right? These are things that aren't coding, but if we think about, you know, building software in teams, the like we're a group of individuals working together with a common goal. I wonder if there's more to this role that they can call out that is less specific about I know it is health and safety operations and they talk about health and safety operations in their second bullet but I wonder if there's more they can do here to show that there is you know a great set of skills they've been able to lean into things that if someone was reading through this they would go oh crap like that would actually be very helpful in a team not to you know just to give you a counter example And this isn't meant to be condescending in any way, right? Workflow systems improve lift driver efficiency and operational productivity. Like this one I think is pretty good. When I see this one down here, I think uh so lead health and safety operations including conducting thorough root cause analysis. Like root cause analysis is really good for being able to debug, understanding incidents, post incident reviews, that kind of stuff. But then like to me it falls off a little bit. Maybe what I want to see here is like what was the scale of this kind of effort? like how are you successful with doing it because I see successfully presented and obtained approval but I don't know enough about this then the person whose resume this is maybe understands the scale of this right that's why they called it out I don't really know as I'm reading this I would look for ways to try and make that more obvious and then honestly I think there as as an operations lead I think there's probably a lot of cool stuff in terms of coordinating leading and driving projects like I would kind take the project manager aspect of things and think about a project manager and a software development team. What types of things are they really focused on? Can you think about your work experience? Call that out in relation to that because that could seem very applicable in a software development team. That would be my sort of uh piece of advice on this. Then we have volunteer front-end developer and lead technician. I wanted to make one more comment on this though. Okay. So, for the health and safety operations lead, given that we're around two pages already, um my piece of advice here would be and there's there isn't in my opinion like a true limit, but I like like roughly you know one to two pages I think is great if you have the experience more than that starts to in my opinion like I would be looking for you to call out the most important things ideally and then you know we can get into conversations beyond that ideally or you have another portfolio. I like again many different ways you can look at this. That's my personal opinion. If they were having challenges calling out ways that they can make this role seem more applicable to software development, and this goes for you as well. Maybe, you know, you have a role that's not software development. It's your current role, too, and it isn't something that you're able to go through this thought exercise and feel like it's very applicable. It's too challenging for you. What you could do in my opinion is you could omit this one, right? There's already one, two, three, four others. That's a bunch of work experience. This one here is already a developer job. This one down here we haven't gotten to yet, but we can see led and supervised a team of five technicians, right? Led and supervised a team leadership skills. you have you know this a different function like sorry different domain but same function if you think about from my experience at least and if I think about really junior software developers if I said okay I need you to lead this project if they're brand new to the workforce that's going to be very challenging for them but for this individual they have experience trying to either manage or coordinate or lead other people different domain but similar functions so I think that that's a really awesome some call out. So, if they have challenges or if you're watching this and you have challenges with your current job and trying to extract some of that, I might omit it. And then if you're like, well, now my resume feels too light, then what I always say on things like this is, especially if you're more junior or you have less work experience, it feels applicable projects, right? Spend more time building projects, especially in the areas that you want to have more experience in. But I personally think that the health and safety operations lead I think this role could have a lot of adjacent like awesome skills and experience. So I would personally focus on that and then I would still pat it with some projects because I don't know exactly where this person wants to go into. I see JavaScript, TypeScript, C, right? Next.js, Noode.js. They could go a handful of different directions here. But to make something up, if they were like, I really want to focus on mobile development, well, go start building some projects and go showcase that you were learning about that. Build that experience up. And that would be my recommendation for this person's resume. So overall, I think this is a really solid start. I think that I would just look at expanding on some of these areas to be honest. And I think this is great. So friendly reminder that if you want your resume reviewed that you can send it into résuméser.ca. Thanks so much and I'll see you in the next one.