Is This Enough AWS Experience To Land A Job?

Today we're going to go through an AWS developer resume. We're going to look at the things that stand out in a positive way and the things that I think that they can improve. So, let's jump over to it and check it out. To kick things off at the top of the resume here, having certificates called it, I think, is a good thing, but I don't think having it right at the start is as important. The reason for this is I don't find as valuable as probably a lot of people think when they get them. I think it's a great opportunity for you to learn about things. I would probably tuck this towards the end of the resume, but I still think it's really good to include. So, have it just maybe not as the focal point. I do think having your professional experience taking up the large majority of your first page is good. So, we do see that here. And a brief little intro that's like one or two lines like they have up at the top. I also think that's nice to have. So, overall, in terms of the layout so far, I would just kind of move the certificates down. But one thing that I noticed about this resume that I really wanted to focus on as we go through this is probably two major things. One is that I see a lot of duplication. And then the other is that as we scroll through this, I'm not the kind of person that is like hellbent on a resume being one or two pages, but there's four pages in total. I think three or four. There's a bunch. And I think that a lot of this can probably go away or be collapsed down to have a little bit more of a succinct message that goes to the person that's reading the resume. So, scrolling back up, professional experience is probably the most important part because this is where you're able to convey what you've been able to do in a professional setting. So, we have this right up at the top, which is good. You know, if it were before the search, I think even better. And if we go through this, I think the important part that we want to see is the amount of impact that someone was able to demonstrate. So if we go through this and look for impact, the other thing that's good is calling out technologies sort of as keywords. So let's go see if they can do that, right? So scalable backend apps, designed, developed, maintain back-end services and restful API. So we can kind of see what they're doing. Okay. Architect and deploy cloud solutions. Okay. automated the provisioning and management of cloud resources using Terraform. So we have a keyword here, right? Terraform nice include stuff like that. GitHub actions AWS code pipeline eliminated manual deployment process and made the release much quicker. Okay, so this is a nice thing, right? Trying to highlight it. Let's see if we can get that to work. Manual deployment process getting out automation coming in very valuable. But can we quantify that even more? I understand what this means, but I think it would be cool if someone has the ability to demonstrate like it saved this much time or there's this many developers that are using this pipeline, this many builds, that kind of thing. Quantifying things can help a lot. I realize that's easier said than done a lot of the time, but something to keep in mind as we go through this. Integrated services like Amazon S3, AWS managed databases such as document DB. some of the language here. Integrated services I would just this is such a minor detail but it's I feel like sometimes language like this minimizes integrated services including is probably what I would say. Using the word like is kind of it to me it almost feels like it's like a oh yeah and there was this and there might have been that like if you just say including it suggests that there are others but these are a focal point. Small little detail just in terms of the the wording. Improved application performance by optimizing database access patterns and indexes. Cool. Do you know by how much? What was the impact of this? This is the kind of thing that takes a message that's like this is the type of work I did to demonstrating even more impact having more value in the message that you're trying to convey to someone reading the resume. Collaborate directly with clients to brainstorm ideas. I think that's great to include something like this. Gather requirements. Translate businesses into technical solutions. This is, I think, something that a lot of developers miss out on. And it depends on where you're working, the types of jobs and stuff you have, but I feel like there's people that go through their careers as developers and they never get this experience and it is tremendously valuable. So, if you have this kind of thing, call it out. I think that sometimes, especially people that don't have a ton of work experience, they might have done some stuff like this and they're like, "Oh, yeah, but I haven't built like this system or I haven't used that technology." But the reality is like having experiences like this can be extremely valuable because like I said, sometimes people go, you know, a large portion of their career and don't get to do this. I'll give you an example. Even for myself, this says collaborated directly with clients to brainstorm ideas. I don't do that at Microsoft, right? I work on a platform team and yes, there are stakeholders that are other partners that build on top of the platform, but I do this type of thing like basically way way way less even including internal partners. Okay? Whereas where I used to work before, I would have a lot more experience doing something closer to that or working with a product manager that was directly doing that. So again, just trying to share with you that even with my own experiences over time, this kind of thing changes a lot. So if you have the experience, call it out. This is where we start to see a little bit of the first duplication. Certificates earned four plus certificates proving expertise and knowledge in across in across different cloud providers. Uh kind of troubling language. And oh, knowledge. Yeah, sorry that doesn't really make sense. And knowledge in across different cloud providers. Small detail. um you know grammar needs to be improved there but earned four certifications and then we see the certificates up here. You don't need to this line doesn't need to exist. It just it's extra. Right? I already have this information up top. So I would just remove that entirely. And then now let's look at where we start to get into even more duplication. I'm calling this out not because there's a problem with emphasizing things, but there's only so much real estate that is on a resume and I think that this resume is extra long just because there is duplication. So, we can make this more succinct. We can try to get the focus on the impact and then not sort of spread it out to kind of waste the reader time or to make someone look at this and feel like, okay, I have to go sifting through for all the information. Key achievements AI and LLM integration. So that's not really called out up at the top. So I don't know where that experience is. Okay. Interesting. Cost optimization analysis. Um reduce AWS infrastructure cost by up to 70% for multiple clients. Is that this work that we saw up here? If so, I would just put it up there. Now I'm kind of looking across multiple sections and it's a little confusing because I don't know where this happened. There's no context that's associated with it. CI/CD automation develop many automation pipelines to increase deployment. Is this like a again like is it an achievement or is this just something that you did as part of your work experience? Because if so I would you know drop it up into this section up at the top cloud architecture serverless applications. Okay. Again is that what we saw up here? we start to see like this kind of stuff called out. But I would just either delete that whole section or take a couple of points from there and put it into an existing section and then you get what is that like a third of a page, a quarter of a page back. Great. We don't want to just like fill a resume and have it take up lots of space. We want it to be succinct and make sure that people can see the impact very clearly. Let's keep going though. the project section when I was reading through this I thought was very interesting um because when I was skimming it and trying to understand what they were doing I'm like this person has worked on a bunch of stuff which is great but usually when I see a project section called out like this is something that's like side projects but as I was reading through it I'm like I feel like this is work experience so I'm a little bit confused as to like is it not their professional experience? Because just to call out, if I scroll back a little lower, um I just wanted to see if there's something that sticks out. Um provide ongoing technical support across multiple clients. That sounds like is is this just like uh work experience on your own? I would group that as like your own work experience, right? Like my point here is when I see a project section, generally the way that I interpret this is like it's not professional experience, but it's stuff that I've worked on to go learn things. Like I have my own personal projects outside of working for Microsoft, outside of the digital forensics company I worked at. They're projects that I built on the side for fun or some of them maybe I turned into small businesses. But like the projects that I did on the side, if I'm including that, it's to show that I was learning and gaining experience. Whereas a lot of this seems like there's potentially some professional experience included here. So, it's a little confusing to me. Then the next thing I just wanted to call out cuz we're not going to go through all of this. And the fact that I'm making a resume review video and saying I'm not going to go through all of this is a bit of a hint that there's probably just too much stuff. It's a funny problem to have, but I think that it's really about just trying to deliver what's the most important part. This is really the feedback I was trying to mention at the beginning. There's duplication, and I would like to see things be more succinct. What is good about how they've laid this out is that they tried to include keywords as they're going through. So, as I'm reading like through this digital sports platform, I can see they worked with AWS, right? Cloudatch, AWS code pipeline, cloudatch, document DB, S3SQS, load balancer, ECS Fargate, CloudFront. There's a lot of stuff that's like these are keywords. These are technologies, things that if I were looking for a developer and our team is using that, I might go, hey, that stands out. This person has used this kind of stuff before. So, I think that's a beneficial thing that they've done here. But I think that some of this stuff is like it gets redundant or it's maybe it's a little bit too detailed. So duplication and then it's almost like implementation details come up. To give you an example, I want to see if there's a good one that comes up here, right? Apply design patterns like repository and strategy. Okay, that's not like I don't know if that's really the most valuable thing to include, especially when you have so much other stuff that's on here. We see I want to see if there's a good example of like some technologies coming up a few times. Let's look at this one. This is the AI powered media processing pipeline. So is this, you know, back uh above where they had the AI related accomplishments like is that this? If so, you know, pull that information down into here and try to shrink this. This seems like an implementation detail to me. So integrated AWS transfer family with SharePoint. Okay. Like I guess the going back to some earlier videos I've made on this kind of thing. The question that you want to have for everything you write on your resume is so what or why should I care? Right? If we apply just literally that statement, why should I care about this this line? It's not to be condescending or rude. This is something that you want to ask yourself as you're going through your own resume. So like why should I care about this? Are you just doing more keyword listing? Like there's lots of keywords already, right? SharePoint. SharePoint properties. SharePoint. We already see SharePoint listed a tons of times. Like I don't I just don't see the value in doing that. Yeah. I think that the way I would look at this is like stop talking about the implementation details and tell me about like the impact of the deliverable you had. I feel like this could be shrunk a ton. I've seen on other résumés if you have a lot of keywords that you want to group, I've seen where people list a couple of bullet points on the deliverables they had, the impact for those deliverables, and then they actually list out some of the technologies they used in like a bit of a list format with the the job experience. And I think that would be something that feels very good here in comparison because the bolding strategy that's used across all of these, it's almost like noise, right? I think you want to be able to bold keywords like they've done, right? But like take this line, set up monitoring and logging with Cloudatch. Monitoring and logging are bolded. Cloudatch is bolded. Designed and implemented is bolded. I don't think that's what you want to be bolding. It's almost like distracting because there's so much. So, I feel like it's a good problem to have, right? That's kind of why I thought it was funny going through this originally because I'm like, this person has done a bunch, but I think that the way that they're summarizing it is like kind of it's just duplicating information and kind of watering down what they've done instead of just focusing on the impact of that work. So, I'm going to keep repeating myself if I try to explain that further, but if we scroll to the next page, it's like it's almost the same thing, right? Different projects. Great. I feel like some of this stuff is professional experience, right? Or I'm guessing the fact that I'm reading a resume and have to guess at that means that it's not obvious. It's not for me to criticize this person and say, "Oh, they did a terrible job of that." This is me being transparent saying I literally do not know and I am slightly confused if this is professional experience or like a side project because this one says disaster recovery solution for an airline company. Seems like that probably shouldn't be a side project. I feel like it has to be real. So like why is this not under work experience? I'm very confused by it. Right. So overall, I think that there's a bunch of experience that just really needs to be tidied up. That's probably my biggest takeaway for that section. Now, if we go into here, the fact that their section above was like bolding all the keywords and stuff, I would get rid of this entire thing. Completely not needed. If you're going to go through and highlight all these things in bold, I would get rid of it because again, like what is this section telling me that I haven't seen bolded like a hundred times in the section above, right? Not not to be mean, but like what is the value in doing that? The value of having a section like this is to call out keywords and make them very obvious, right? So, you can use this strategy. I think there's nothing wrong with that. But when you do this, it makes this other part not really needed or the other way around. And then one of the drawbacks to doing this kind of thing with a dedicated section is that I don't know how you've applied those things in the other work that you've done. So I think that you can do both, but I would say if you're going to do both, I would keep this part short, right? What are the top skills to focus on? And then I would do a lot less of the bolding in the the sections above. It's just at some point it becomes noise and it starts missing the value or the point that you were trying to accomplish. Next up, courses. I would get rid of this entire section. Not sorry, not the interest. I think you can include interests, but the challenge here. Okay, one thing at a time, I guess. Courses. I just wouldn't include courses ever. I think if you're an intern, that's fine. And this person, if I'm not mistaken, I think they might be wrapping up school. So maybe they have this left over from internships, but I would get rid of courses entirely. One thing that is important is this line here, educa. Oh, it's highlighting both. Sorry. Um, typo and selftaught. So again, proofread your stuff. Uh, self-taught software engineer. That's not education. So like don't include that. And then this part, I assume what they're trying to do with the choruses is to demonstrate like here's all the things I learned. But I don't think that I have ever looked at someone's courses and made decisions on that. I think that if you want to call out like boot camp accomplishments, like with your certificates and stuff like that, I would just collapse this thing down like crazy. There's too much here that I'm just It's kind of noise at some point. So, you know, boot camp, boot camp, boot camp. Great. Okay. You know, these extra courses like doesn't really matter to me. Are these the certifications? Like, if they're theerts from above, right? I would again just collapse these into like education and certificates, something like that. This page could be, you know, a quarter of the size, a third of the size. And that's not bad, right? It's actually very beneficial to sort of collapse these things so that they're a lot easier to consume. I think that's overall my feedback for this. I think this person does have a lot of like really interesting, valuable experience they've called out across all of this, but the delivery of this is like it's kind of just everywhere. If you notice, like I said earlier, I'm catching myself going, I'm not reading through all this. I'm making a video on my own time and I'm not going to read through all this. there's just too many like like implementation details, duplication, and stuff like that. So, something to consider. You want this stuff to be concise. You want to get to the main point of your impact and try not to duplicate things because at the end of the day, like having a lot more stuff isn't necessarily better. So, I hope that you found that helpful. If you're interested in having the opportunity for your resume to be reviewed, you can submit it to résuméser.ca. Thank you so much, and I'll see you in the next one.