On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 02:08:05AM -0500, JD Runyan wrote: > Todd Walton wrote: > >On 6/2/05, Lan Barnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > >>If your interviews are like the above, I'm not surprised you don't have > >>one. > > > > > >Thanks, Lan. The fact is, though, that I can't even get an interview. > > My resume shuts the door for me on all the jobs I've been looking > >for. > > > >-todd > > > > > You might want to rewrite you resume. I targeted my resume to specific > job listings, and started to get called for nearly every job. Rather > than list all of my experience in detail, I gave over views, and only
This is good advice. I've done a bunch of different things (journalism, development, SCM -- and that's what I'll admit to). My full resume just confuses people. I have reorganized it into three views appropriate for the kind of job I'm looking for. A word of caution. It's probably not a good idea to try to squeeze something out of your resume that isn't really there. Again, on the openings I originally announced, we're looking for a senior, experienced SCM engineer (don't get mad at me, that's just what we need). We have already screened (and discarded) a bunch of resumes from developers who did a bit of SCM for their development projects along the way and tried to highlight that in such a way as to make themselves appear more experienced that they were. FWIW, our company also takes the most inexperienced of all, college interns, and grows its own talent. And entry level positions can appear. But usually not in SCM or even development. The usual route in is as a test engineer, and we take them very seriously and promote them appropriately. I might add that I've been doing this SCM stuff for close to 20 years now, and I never met an SCM specialist who set out with that career path in mind. It doesn't hold a very glamorous position in the techie mind space. But if you like finding orderly solutions to complex logic puzzles, it can be very satisfying. I love it. I'll never do professional development again if I have a choice. Oh, one other nugget from years of job searches at various levels of desperation. A little bit of experiential metaphysical fatalism: if you get turned down for a job, no matter how much you thought you wanted it, it probably wasn't a good job for you. Be grateful and move on. The one or two times I managed to squeeze myself into something that wasn't supposed to be, it turned into the job from hell and I had to go running into the night. -- Lan Barnes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Linux Guy, SCM Specialist 858-354-0616 -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
