After taking in some of the reviews of other resumes, I have updated my own.
Any advice would be great!
Great job overall, but I noticed a variety of things to consider fixing:
- You mention being a “previous Computer Science major”. The first question that entered my mind was, did you graduate? If you did, you should say that you’re a graduate; if you didn’t, then you should add further clarification. “Computer Science” should be de-capitalized here, btw (although it’s ok to capitalize it under your Education section).
- “I am currently working with front-end with like JavaScript”: it seems like you forgot to put at least one extra word in here, as the wording doesn’t make sense as-is.
- Node and Express aren’t server-side languages (Node is called a runtime engine and Express is called a web application framework on their respective websites), and Mongoose isn’t a database (it says right on its website that it’s an ODM), so you should re-word those parts. Technicalities maybe, but it’s important to know exactly what Node, Express, and Mongoose are, and any developers who end up coming across your resume will catch any mistakes. Also, “Node” should always be referred to as “Node.js” since that’s how it appears on its website.
- JavaScript ES6 isn’t mutually exclusive with front-end, so you don’t need to add that qualifier—and since not everyone refers to ES6 as ES6, you should probably write it as “Proficient with ES6/ES2015” to make sure you get matches by resume-tracking systems.
- Are you familiar with Angular, or AngularJS? They’re sort of different frameworks—Angular is 2.x+ and AngularJS is 1.x only. If you know both, make that clear, otherwise mention only the one that you know.
- You know Angular and React? This part is confusing because of the above point. Also, not very many people bother to learn both Angular and React, particularly to an in-depth level, so when you state this, it needs to be true, and for any skills that you list on your resume, you should be confident enough to answer any questions about them in an in-person interview. If you’re not at that stage yet with any skills that you’ve listed, then you should delete those skills.
- Your Experience section should consist solely of actual work experience—either paid or volunteer. Don’t mix it with personal projects—the Grammar Checker and YelpCamp. Make a new section called Personal Projects for those.
- Unless you really went all-out with YelpCamp and have already added features & functionality that weren’t part of Colt Steele’s course, I’d recommend deleting it from your resume and from your personal projects. Especially if you’re just posting the app that you made from following along with the course—that’s not really your code at all, as it’s code that Colt Steele wrote. The projects that you put on your resume should be either original projects that you come up with yourself from scratch, or collaborative projects that you created with a team. Projects that you created by following along with a MOOC show neither your ability nor originality—which are two of the crucial ingredients in getting a job.
- The links to your projects should ideally go to your deployed versions on Heroku, and not your GitHub repos. Anyone who’s inclined to check out your code will be motivated enough to check out your GitHub profile, but far more people will want to see your applications in action and play around with them, and won’t bother to view your source code.
- The content in your Experience section needs to be worded so that an average person will be able to understand what you did. Resumes are typically read by hiring managers or recruiters, and less often by other developers, so you need to minimize the “tech speak” and use language that’s more easily understood by more people.
- You mention “Rails” in passing in your Experience, but “Ruby on Rails” isn’t listed above under Frameworks, why?
- Your subtitle is “Front-End Web Developer” but I didn’t see either HTML or CSS listed anywhere on your resume as skills, why are those missing?
- Your online and PDF resumes should be mostly identical, but they have glaring inconsistencies with lots of mis-matches, and each has info that the other doesn’t. You should make sure that the content on both of them match.
- Speaking to the above point, your location and contact info need to be in both versions. And by location, you only need to include your city and state. Delete your mailing address, as that’s personal info that no one needs to know, but you should keep your phone number, e-mail address, and any relevant links.
- Your e-mail address should look professional to hiring managers and recruiters, but it doesn’t convey professionalism with the word “hey” in front. If you could set up a different alias or inbox on your domain, you should consider doing so.
- Both versions of your resume also need to have a LinkedIn URL, which is arguably the most important link on the resume. It’s by far one of the most-checked links on resumes in general—and not including it will generally be regarded as a red flag.
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https://check-yoself.herokuapp.com/ is offline
Thanks for the review! I’m going to fix some of this tonight.
I’m still working on Check Yo Self so should I even list this? That’s why I put the GitHub link instead.
I’ll delete YelpCamp.
I worked with Rails at dev.to but don’t really have much experience with it. Didn’t realize I still had it there.
Will take a look at all this.
Took it offline as I’m completely rewriting the front-end.
Your CV is an absolute dream, it’s so concise and so well presented. Do you have a github account as well? (you should think about adding that in, if you could share your projects that is)
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