It’s been my job for over 20 years(!)
I do admit, writing a technical resume is a bit more complicated than writing other types of professional resumes. An effective technology resume clearly shows off a candidate’s technical skills – because a hiring manager shouldn’t have to go digging for this key information.
In general, your priorities are:
(1) make it clear you have exactly what they’re technically looking for, and then
(2) briefly include your other technical skills in case they provide additional value.
The first page of your technical resume is critical.
You want your first page to get you past HR (yes, many will want to just tick off all the keywords that the job requires) yet a good Hiring Manager will also read past the technical skills section and look at your experience section for context and substance, not just technology keywords.
Let’s break it down …
What is the Best Way to Organize an IT Tech Resume:
At the top of your resume you want to include a compelling “summary”. This summary includes your work experience, the brand name companies you may have worked for or your industry verticals, and briefly your top and most valuable technical skills. Also include some strong soft skills and ideally one or two relevant accomplishments that you offer from your working experience.
Yet this is not where you want to go deeply into all of your computer skills. For that, you’ll need a technical skills section – placed ideally before your professional experience section.
The Technical Skills Section of Your Resume
The technical skills section of your resume should be an accurate reflection of what you can do and what you have done in the past. This doesn’t mean though that you should include every technology you’ve ever worked on, read a book about, that you took in school, or dabbled with on your own time.
You don’t want to oversell yourself on technology that you don’t have some true “working” experience on. List only those programs/applications/technologies that you could confidently discuss in an interview with examples.
“Your resume is meant to sell you yet you don’t want to exaggerate your experience or technical
skills and end up in an interview where you are going to be embarrassed”.
I recommend you organize everything into categories such as languages, development tools, databases, platforms or operating systems, protocols /methodologies, and so forth.
Keywords
The best keywords for your resume depend on your job target and your specific experience. Specific programs and applications are often used as keywords, which is another reason a Technical Summary is a good idea. A simple and effective technique is to review and use online job descriptions that you know you are a strong fit with. This ensures you are including all the technology and keywords that you have legitimate experience in and what the job requires.
3 Resume Issues Tech/IT Professionals Wrestle With:
- Whether to list technical skills alphabetically or in ‘order of importance’. I firmly believe perceived order of importance is best (ie. the most important at the beginning to the lesser relevance).
- Whether to include every skill and how much detail to provide: Delete outdated technologies or those with no major relevance to the job(s) you’re pursuing.
- How to differentiate between expert knowledge of a technology versus passing familiarity. See an Example below.
3 Examples of How to Summarize Your Technical Skills
- Paragraph Format — the most common form that I use. It is a simple formatting for both the human eye and the ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) that are in use when you are posting to online job postings.
TECHNICAL SKILLS:
Languages: Java (core) / J2EE, JavaScript, Python, C++/C (compiler), PHP, CSS, XML, HTML, UML.
Tools: Git, Xcode, Visual Studio, Eclipse, JBuilder, Dreamweaver, Borland C++Builder, Oracle SQL*Plus.
Databases: Oracle, SQL, MySQL, MongoDB (Academic only)
Operating Systems/Platforms: Windows 10/7/, Linux (Ubuntu), Mobile (Android), iOS (Self taught – see additional experience at the end of resume)
Other: Microsoft Office (including Project), Agile Methodology environment
- List Format — this gives the hiring manager a quick overview. Note that many ATS don’t like a lot of formatting when you are uploading to online job postings. Fancy tables and formatting often get very garbled and become unreadable.
TECHNICAL SKILLS:
Languages | Tools | Operating Systems (OS) |
Java /J2ee
C/C++ Python JavaScript SQL HTML UML XML |
JBuilder
Dreamweaver Rational Rose UltraEdit Borland C++Builder Oracle SQL* Plus Visual Paradigm Sublime Text 3 |
Windows 10/7/XP
MS-DOS, BASIC Linux (Ubuntu, Redhat) iOS Android Mobile
|
- List Format including years of experience and skill level — this gives more detail yet this can get very long. Ideally it should be used on the last page of your resume if you want to include a history of all of your specific skills. Remember you will always have to be continuously updating this and it can get very tedious and/or out of date quickly. (An alternative is to denote only the years of experience).
TECHNICAL SKILLS:
Languages | Years’ Experience | Skill Level |
Java/J2EE
XML C/C++ Python JavaScript SQL HTML UML MongoDB |
6
3 6 4 6 4 6 2 <1 |
Expert
Intermediate Expert Intermediate Expert Intermediate Intermediate Intermediate Novice (Academic) |
This format is especially good to create for government-based submissions (as they are not as sensitive to the length of resumes as many corporate/ private companies). Often the longer/more detailed the better for government! This format also creates a master record of all of your technology skills over the years.
What Comes Next
So far we have focused a lot on the technical skill set and keywords. The body of your resume is where you have to back up these technology claims.
Focus on Your Technical Results
Many clients who ask me to review or recreate their technical IT resume make one of three critical errors — either the document is excessively long with excruciating detail on every assignment ever completed, too short with hardly any results or description or thirdly, it only really reads like a string of vague job descriptions. There needs to be some middle ground — the resume should be succinct yet effectively showcase your specific achievements.
What to Include in the Professional Experience or Work History Section:
Your work experience is one of the most important parts of your resume, so be thorough. Your work history is what shows your potential future employer all of your skills, talents and accomplishments to date. It also shows your past ability to remain in a role long enough for them to get value back from hiring you. They will be looking at the dates!
Often what I also see is candidates include information about the company itself in their work experience section of the resume. Don’t.
Your future job employer rarely cares about what the other company did. What they do care about is what you personally did and what you can do for them if they hire you!
“When listing your work experience, leave out the details of the company.
Use your space for talking about your own accomplishments and skills”.
Mention tangible and measurable results whenever possible.
For each position you’ve held, give a brief synopsis of the scope of your responsibility and accomplishments. Remember to indicate if possible how your performance benefited your company (less downtime, less QA errors, faster time-to-market, money saved, etc.). Accomplishments are most powerful when they are quantifiable.
The Bottom Line on Technical Skills Resume Writing Tips
Yes, you need to put your technical skills on your resume. Yet this isn’t the only thing that is going to get you noticed and hired.
- Review your entire resume to ensure that you’re not repeating yourself in wording, losing your reader with generalities and/or just regurgitating old job descriptions. Focus on your most impressive technical projects and accomplishments with some specific and relevant technical details.
- Make sure your first page has impact – a compelling Summary, a Technical Skills section as well as your Work History. Create your summary after you have crafted the body of your resume as it is often easier to recognize several compelling accomplishments worthy of mentioning in the summary. Bullet points are easy to read.
- I believe a one-page resume is much too brief or crowded to do anyone yet the most famous (think Elon Musk) or the most junior justice. Two to four (maximum) pages are often required for technology resumes if you have been working 10+ years.
“Technical IT resumes tend to be longer for techies that have a mature work history –
it takes time and space to detail out both your technical skills and your work accomplishments”.