Please give me some resume feedback

Career Advice
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I’m working to improve my portfolio, but how’s my resume look? Should I de-emphasize my current job and put more projects under Web Developer. Is “self employ” a good way to show self taught experience? Should I add more buzzwords to my skills? Other general feedback also appreciated.

Thanks!

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It’s self employed, “self employ” doesn’t make sense.

Your current job is probably more important (at the very least as important), so don’t deemphasize it.

You don’t need to say your course included two computer science modules. You’ve done a geoscience degree then worked as a GIS developer, it can be inferred that you have software engineering skills, two modules of CS is 🤷

Material UI isn’t really a skill, it’s just a library. There’s a line – eg React is JS, but it’s more than reasonable to list it as a separate skill – but you don’t need to list arbitrary libraries.

Imo “JavaScript geek” doesn’t sound very professional and I would drop it, it just sounds flippant.

Otherwise looks really nice; you don’t have a lot of experience so you can’t really (and don’t need to) expand it much. You’ve been to uni, done a technical subject, gone into a job where you’ve worked as a developer, and at the same time expanded your skillset to include front-end web development. It’s a very clear story: you have technical skills, you’ve exercised them in a dev job, you have identified where you want to go now, and you’ve put the time in to acquire the skills needed to get there. Also, minor, but though CVs don’t really need much design, what is there looks very good indeed, it’s very pleasant to read.

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Thanks! It’s good to have a little outside perspective and I appreciate your detailed feedback.

Seems like my resume might be ok aside from a few tweaks. I haven’t gotten any interviews in my past thirty or forty applications; maybe I just need to improve my portfolio site.

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Hey according to the conversation above, i think your resume looks good. Like your insight , it might be the portfolio that you might want to focus on along with applying to places which would value your skills more than applying to a large number of places. That way you would be able to concentrate more on quality than quantity of applications

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Everything @DanCouper mentioned. Being self-employed is important as it shows you can run a business with organisation skills. You may be asked in an interview about the clients you worked for, and why you don’t want to be self-employed now.

I looked at your profile site. You have some nice projects on there.
I’d stay away from having to force visitors to copy your e-mail address, open an email client and paste it in. Have a nice contact form in the modal instead that will also demonstrate your form validation and data handling abilities. That brings me on to the ‘Checkout App’, which does look nice. It has no validation at all, which you should really have, especially if you are using it to get a job. Why not have the visitor’s inputs displayed on the review page?

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Well I don’t really have any paying clients, so maybe that section is misleading? I wasn’t sure how else to show that I’ve spent a lot of time teaching myself web development.

Yeah a contact form would be a solid idea. I think they might be a little bit annoying to implement on github pages where my site is hosted but it does look more professional. My portfolio site definitely due for an overhaul.

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What’s a good way to be selective in my applications? I feel like when breaking into the industry I can’t be too choosey so I just apply ewverywhere I think I can reasonably do the work.

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  • I’d recommend ditching the split-column layout in favor of a single-column one. Split-column layouts don’t scan well by ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems), which are often used in larger companies—the larger the company, the more likely they use an ATS).
  • You should only have your name once on your resume, it doesn’t make any sense why you’d put your name twice?
  • Agree that “javascript geek” should be deleted; lots of people can claim to be one so it doesn’t set you apart in any way.
  • It looks like you didn’t provide either a LinkedIn URL or GitHub URL? Both of those should be added; not having a LinkedIn URL can cause automatic rejections and most companies now look for a GitHub URL too. Your website link should be moved to the top; and not placed with your experience. And your location should just be city & state (no mailing address or ZIP code).
  • Your Skills are a bit light, anything you can add there? It could stand to have 1 or 2 more items, even if that’s just HTML and CSS. Since you mentioned Python, can you add either Flask or Django? Do you know Node.js yet? AWS? A relational DB system? Redux or D3?
  • Any links on your resume should be clickable when shared in PDF, so make sure those get activated in your word processing software.
  • Your experience for the Aiken County Government is written somewhat technically, I’d recommend rewriting that. Keep in mind that recruiters and HR reps will be the ones reading your resume most of the time, not other developers—so keep the wording easy to understand for the average person. And highlight accomplishments, not the nitty-gritty details of what your work technically involves because few people care about that. Provide numbers where you can—such as if something you did made anything faster (specify how much faster), or an amount of money saved, etc.
  • Your Education is unnecessarily wordy. Your degree and “Obtained a Bachelor’s degree” can be reduced to “BS in GIS (Geographic Information Science)”. That’s actually all you need to say about your education for Clark University; the rest can be deleted without sacrificing anything. No offense intended, but you might as well not mention CS if you only took 2 classes.
  • If you completed Udacity’s Mobile Web Specialist nanodegree, you should be clearer about that. I’d recommend reducing your wording so it just says “Completed Udacity’s Mobile Web Specialist 6-month nanodegree”. You really don’t need the rest; anyone who doesn’t know what the nanodegree involves will Google it to find out. You don’t need to take up space on your resume to tell them.
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This is clear and good advice, thank you for taking the time to look at my resume.

I think a lot of what you say makes sense and I plan to implement most or all of your suggestions.

I’d pretty much just put something together using a google docs template but I think a denser one column format might be the way to go, even if it makes the graphic designer in me sad.

I’d like to write more about projects I’ve done, should I put that under experience or create a new section?

Thanks for your help!

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I’ve seen that most people have put personal projects into a separate section, which makes more sense.

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