Hi. I am a career changer (hopefully!) and before sending this out, I was hoping to get a few eyes on it to see if you can see any weak points. I am hoping to get a general software developer job. I appreciate any and all help.
Hi @derrick.gatewood !
Welcome to the forum!
I think it looks good.
You have a lot of things going for you.
You have work experience, finishing up a masters in computer science and some projects to show.
I might personally get rid of the last line about ranking 3rd in number of correct problems in your class.
Good luck with the job search!
Some things I noticed:
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Depending on if you’re applying to jobs just within your location or beyond, you should consider adding your location in “City, State” format.
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LinkedIn profile is missing. And the GitHub profile should be in the form of github.com/username, and should be a clickable link.
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Languages/Libraries/Skills section should be placed second, not at the bottom. Your order should be: Education, Languages / Libraries / Skills, Projects, Employment.
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I’d recommend re-writing your skills in this order: “Java/Spring/JUnit, C#, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, MySQL, Git”.
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Speaking of your skills, do you not yet know a front-end framework? If you’re considering something new to learn, I’d recommend Angular given the languages you currently know, since Java and C# are most often used with Angular.
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I’d recommend changing “Master of Science” to just “MS”, or at least adding “(MS)” immediately after that. Keyword matches are important to have.
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Delete your coursewoork. Those don’t really add anything. Also if you’re pursuing an MS, surely you’re specializing in a specific field? Mention that instead.
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Your UT-A education is missing a date of graduation.
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As I’m not familiar with your location, what is “Eagle-Mountain Saginaw I.S.D.”? If that’s an institution, business, or organization otherwise it needs to be obvious to anyone reading your resume. In that spot you’ve placed it on the page, that’s where you’d usually put a geographic location, i.e. city & state. Usually organizations are placed either directly above or below your position (i.e. the line above or line below).
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Your date formatting needs to be consistent & clean. I’d recommend aligning that to the right page margin.
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Your project descriptions are too low-level. Just keep them as high-level in terms of describing what they are. I’d recommend 2 bullet points max for each of them as well. Your resume is going to be skimmed in most cases and not read super carefully, so make it easy to read & understand for average people (i.e. recruiters and HR).
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Even though your resume is not bad IMO as a new grad, but there are many mistakes that’s typical to a new grad.
I ll just point out a few obvious things that I see:
In general, i think these two are the most important things to do:
- Find a mentor, someone that has industry experience to tailor your resume and even give you some more career guidance. May be some senior classmate that has secured a full time position, or a really good youtube channel, or random senior tech guy on the internet, or even some free career help session host by whatever company, use whatever you could find. Your resume is not competitive enough for swe position in good/high tier company if that’s what you are looking for.
- Since you are not yet graduate, try really really really hard on finding some software developement internship before you graduate and run into full time. Instructor position doesn’t give you much boost in terms of experience. Can’t stress the importance of internship enough.
Educations:
- Less emphasis on coursework if you could, it is almost a last resort have you dont have other technical work to show
- Be consistent on your time format, u are missing the time for your degree in University of Texas
Employment:
- Be more technical and elaborate on your result, you have 6 years on this position and you are underselling it. Its a red flag to me if I’m the hiring manager.
Projects:
- GITHUB REPO is a MUST
- if you don’t have it already, DEPLOY IT
- This is a a typical one, remove x number lines of code. It does more harm than good, it doesn’t give a good context on your project scale and code quality. Showing the project repo will speak for itself.
- Be more technical, besides did X using Y, emphasis on scale, performance, fault tolerance, things that is technical challenge in the industry than toy projects. It does not have to be fancy, stating them just shows that you do have a perspective on these technical things. Convert things like “serving thousands of people” to descriptions like: “handle 100000 server request”, “can handle 500 read query per second at peak”, “generated 10000 product impressions a day”. Things like “questions were dynamically produced at a time” to “the xxx system is designed in xx architecture to generate unique random question to an user with xxx algorithm”
Skills:
- You need to beef them up and dive deeper.
- elaborate more on the tech, like Spring, is it Spring Boot? Spring MVC? What infrastructure you are using to host your server? You could list them out for example if you used tomcat for web server, aws ec2 for hosting ur app, aws s3 for hosting your images/assets
- remove trivial skills like git, you have github on your contact, it already speaks for that.
It might seems to be a lot of work to do before u start applying, just want to emphasize that it is a continuely evolving process to work on your resume. Again your resume is not bad IMO, the resume i started with when i was a new grad was much, much weaker. Start applying and keep on grinding, send them out for internship and full time as you polishing it. Also try to get as much professional help as you could to keep yourself in check with the job market.
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Also, I want to mention that since you are in school take advantage of the resources that are available to you.
Universities have some sort of career office and alumni center.
I would reach out to them and see if you can get connected with some alumni that are working developers.
A lot of students fail to use this valuable resource and it really is a shame.
Alumni centers are always having networking events and can help you get connected with those in the industry from your school.
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