My Resume...

[kevin11951]

I wanted to show off my most recent resume... Does anyone have any ideas for things I should change?

About Me:
I am seventeen, and I have had very little experience in my life so far...

I plan to get a lot more experience over the next few years via a business I plan to start called Kviero-IT (see sig), plus I plan to get an Associate Degree in LAN Administration from ACC (http://www3.austincc.edu/it/cms/www/awardplans/awardplan.php?year=2010&type=CC&group=PCCIS&nid=9768&apid=65) this year, or next.


Page 1:
http://ubuntuone.com/p/K6K/

Page 2:
http://ubuntuone.com/p/K6L/

I used images because it is much easier to block out words in gimp, than it is to edit a PDF.

Edit: Images updated to reflect recent changes (10/13/10)

[pwnst*r]

In a normal format on PDF does that fit onto one page? If not, you should try and make it fit.

Also, your first mention of Clonezilla is spelled incorrectly.

[brian183]

Having a two page resume is fine. Also, for each experience it's a good idea to have a "Key Skills" line where you list out tools you've learned to use (ie. software) and other skills.

[phredbull]

I'd change the heading "Hobbies" to "Skills" or "Skills and Interests". And pwnst*r is right; if you don't have a ton of relevant experiences, try to make it all fit neatly onto 1 page.

[kevin11951]

In a normal format on PDF does that fit onto one page? If not, you should try and make it fit.

Also, your first mention of Clonezilla is spelled incorrectly.

It does take up two pages, however, there is no way to get it all to fit on one page, unless the font was set to 1/4th of what it is now...

Fixed the typo (though, not in the images, just my personal copy...)

[Kdar]

My resume is also 2 pages.

First page have things like Objective, Education, Work experience

Second page have Skills and References.

[phredbull]

Mine is 2 pages as well, but that includes 15 years of job experience and project credits. Short and to the point is better than fluffy and bloated, and HR people will immediately spot the fluff. At least that's what I've always been told.

[ve4cib]

I was always told that a two-page resume is a good thing to aim for, provided you can actually fill it with things that are useful. Never go longer than two pages (unless it's a CV, in which case you pretty much have to).

If you don't have much in the way of actual work experience make sure to play-up any volunteer work you've done, even if it's unrelated to the field you're applying for. Do you help supervise younger kids at school? Help out with the local Scout Troop? Run a drop-in computer help desk at school? Participate in any after-school sports or clubs? Etc...

Anything that shows leadership and/or communication skills is a great bonus for any resume. Regardless of what profession you're in the ability to communicate clearly and work independently are huge assets, and if you've got them then play them up.

(NB: I haven't actually read the OP's resume, so he may have already addressed many of my points therein. I'm speaking mostly in broad, general terms for whoever else happens across this thread.)

[RiceMonster]

Try to avoid putting everything in paragraphs. Use point form more often, so employers can quickly look at what you did in your previous roles.

Hobbes - get rid of it. Who cares? If you really want to include this, keep it brief.

Skills - where are they?

[Frogs Hair]

Most student employment services at collages have resume examples that you can view on line . Check out many different ones , this helps to improve your format. If your school has free resume reviews an mock interviews , take advantage of those services.

[phredbull]

Also, starting with a template can be a big help, there's lots of sharp looking ones available!

[pwnst*r]

Two pages with no experience is too many, imo.

[RiceMonster]

Two pages with no experience is too many, imo.

And if you are going to use 2 pages, don't make it like an essay or something where it can carry on to the next page whenever you want. Each page should be neatly organized and have different topics.


But yeah, keep it simple and to the point. Employers don't sit down, grab a coffee, kick back and read your resume. They just glance over it. Make sure they can do that and get your strong points.

[samalex]

You said you don't have much experience yet your resume goes into two pages. Back in the day that was taboo, but anymore I think it's okay if you just can't fit your accomplishments and history on two pages. In your case I think you need to slim it down and try to keep it at one page.

Also on a side note one of my good friends is a system admin in the IT department at ACC. My wife and I thought about uprooting and moving to Austin MANY times and that's where we looked at applying, but just never came to fruition. It's a great school...

Sam

[juancarlospaco]

I write my own software that make resume, and write my resume on that, a lot of fun with python :)

[ve4cib]

Now that it's not almost midnight I've got time to look at your resume and provide less-generic suggestions...

First off, it looks very "wordy." Resumes must be easy to read quickly. This is an even more important consideration than the number of pages or quality/quantity of your experience. You could be the best-qualified person ever, but if your resume doesn't read easily no one will know that. Keep it simple, brief, and very to-the-point.

I would format your work experience something like this:



Company/Organization (Job Title, Start Date - End Date)
1-2 short sentance description of what the company/position is
- bullet-style list of your
- key responsibilities


For example, rewriting the first job you listed:



____ Technologies LLC (Web Designer, 2007-??) <-- fill in the complete time-frame
___ Technologies LLC is a start-up company located in ?? that does ??
Primary responsibilities included:
- Designing a new company website
- Deploying the website on ?? server, using ??


Obviously there are a lot of blanks you'd need to fill in. If you weren't actually an employee of * LLC then you should say that you were a Freelance designer. Then instead of "Primary responsibilities included:" you could say "Major clients included:" and then list some of your major design contracts, providing URLs if they are still online and using your work.

I'd almost be tempted to file your Ubuntu forums troubleshooting under some kind of volunteer experience, but that's up to you. Again, keep it brief, and be specific if you can. Do you remember any of the kinds of problems you solved? Can you provide links, thank-you counts, etc...?

I'm going to go against the current and say that including a hobbies/interests section is a good thing. As someone who's read resumes and interviewed people, it's nice to see what else someone does with their time. The hobbies and interests section is also a good place to show off any non-conventional experience you may have that fits in. Being the captain of a football team, while not typically worthy of putting on a resume, can be useful in showing that you have good leadership and communication skills for instance. You can be free-form here, but try to keep it down to 2-3 lines of text at most. They want an idea of what you do, not a list of your every accomplishment.


So, to sum-up:
- use bullets to list your major responsibilities for each job/volunteer position you list
- list your experience in reverse-chronological order (newest first), with the date-range you were employed doing each job
- keep your points brief and to-the-point; avoid unnecessary "cruft" in your sentences
- be specific: provide examples, etc... Instead of saying you did something in "a fraction of the usual time" say how long it took you. (Keep in mind: 9/2 is still "a fraction", so choose your words carefully.)

[pwnst*r]

Now that it's not almost midnight I've got time to look at your resume and provide less-generic suggestions...

First off, it looks very "wordy." Resumes must be easy to read quickly. This is an even more important consideration than the number of pages or quality/quantity of your experience. You could be the best-qualified person ever, but if your resume doesn't read easily no one will know that. Keep it simple, brief, and very to-the-point.

I would format your work experience something like this:



Company/Organization (Job Title, Start Date - End Date)
1-2 short sentance description of what the company/position is
- bullet-style list of your
- key responsibilities


For example, rewriting the first job you listed:



____ Technologies LLC (Web Designer, 2007-??) <-- fill in the complete time-frame
___ Technologies LLC is a start-up company located in ?? that does ??
Primary responsibilities included:
- Designing a new company website
- Deploying the website on ?? server, using ??


Obviously there are a lot of blanks you'd need to fill in. If you weren't actually an employee of * LLC then you should say that you were a Freelance designer. Then instead of "Primary responsibilities included:" you could say "Major clients included:" and then list some of your major design contracts, providing URLs if they are still online and using your work.

I'd almost be tempted to file your Ubuntu forums troubleshooting under some kind of volunteer experience, but that's up to you. Again, keep it brief, and be specific if you can. Do you remember any of the kinds of problems you solved? Can you provide links, thank-you counts, etc...?

I'm going to go against the current and say that including a hobbies/interests section is a good thing. As someone who's read resumes and interviewed people, it's nice to see what else someone does with their time. The hobbies and interests section is also a good place to show off any non-conventional experience you may have that fits in. Being the captain of a football team, while not typically worthy of putting on a resume, can be useful in showing that you have good leadership and communication skills for instance. You can be free-form here, but try to keep it down to 2-3 lines of text at most. They want an idea of what you do, not a list of your every accomplishment.


So, to sum-up:
- use bullets to list your major responsibilities for each job/volunteer position you list
- list your experience in reverse-chronological order (newest first), with the date-range you were employed doing each job
- keep your points brief and to-the-point; avoid unnecessary "cruft" in your sentences
- be specific: provide examples, etc... Instead of saying you did something in "a fraction of the usual time" say how long it took you. (Keep in mind: 9/2 is still "a fraction", so choose your words carefully.)

Nice reply and constructive.

[Ranko Kohime]

It does take up two pages, however, there is no way to get it all to fit on one page, unless the font was set to 1/4th of what it is now...

Fixed the typo (though, not in the images, just my personal copy...)
Remove the line spacing in the paragraphs and you'll be 3/4 of the way there. Organization is good, white space, not so much.

ETA: Or, even better, as mentioned above, just do away with the paragraphs entirely.

Also: Perhaps your objective should be "employment", not "looking for employment". There's a full line right there, plus it sounds better. :)

[whiskeylover]

I work as a consultant, and it is the norm in my line of work to have massive resumes. Mine is 8 pages long. There is no way it can be condensed into 1-2 pages.

But if you're a fresher, without a lot of experience, then yeah, it should fit in 1-2 pages.

[kevin11951]

Images updated to reflect recent changes (10/13/10)

[ve4cib]

Images updated to reflect recent changes (10/13/10)

It's better, but a few things still strike me as being "off" about it:

1- List your experience in reverse-chronological order (i.e. most-recent stuff first). Potential employers care most about what you're doing right now/most-recently, and less about what you did 3+ years ago

2- The interests section still strikes me as looking very wordy and dense. After the nice, clean, easy-to-read bullets earlier we're suddenly hit with paragraphs of prose. Not good.

3- The indentation on the first page seems weird. Did you do freelance work as part of your other job (at which point it's not freelance)? Or did you mis-align things and the freelance work should be at the same level as the other jobs? It's not clear to me at all what's going on.

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

This is intended to be constructive even if it hurts your feelings.

I am a manager, and read resumes quit often. If the resume is easy to read, and no more that two pages, that is fine. Anything more than two pages becomes annoying with information about jobs skills that have become outdated.

If you say you have skills in something you must be prepared to be tested on them. In the present economy I am not looking for someone that can just fill a position. There are five people fighting for the same job. I can be very selective about who I hire. If you are only familiar with something, and not confident in being tested on those skills, then state that you are familiar with it. Don't waste my time by suggesting you have skills that you don't have.

After skimming your resume, you have shown experience from 2007 to 2010 that amounts to about 2 weeks of work compared to my administrators. I would only conciser you for an entry level job, and not an administrator level job. Get rid of the "Objective" line at the top of your resume. If I were to hire you at an entry level job, then I will work with you regarding training, mentoring, and OJT to achieve your carrier goals.

Looking at your website, I have a few problems with it. For example:
1) You show the business hours; however, neglect to specify the time zone.
2) Your website advertises services; however, there is no agreement for response time when there are interruptions to those services.
3) There is no agreement on the consequences of not delivering on those services as advertised.
4) There is no agreement regarding who measures the compliance to those service agreements.
Before you offer a service, you need to protect yourself both contractually and legally.

Best of luck! :)

[aysiu]

I think I'm repeating what some others have said, but here are my nitpicks: The font looks too much like a typewriter. Something a little more pleasing to the eye, even as simple as Arial or Helvetica, would serve the reader better. Ditch the Objective at the top. Unnecessary. That's what your cover letter is for. Your experience should be listed in reverse chronological order. Given how little experience you do have, there's no reason for your resume to be two pages long. Leave out all the commentary about the system administrator and the owner. Focus on your job and what you did at each place. If I were your potential employer, your resume would go to the bottom of the pile just for using the word setup as a verb. Proper usage examples are I took the time to set up these systems or I really like this setup. When you have only two pages (one for the cover letter, one for your resume) to impress a potential employer, do everything in your power to impress--including proofreading for grammatical errors. On another grammatical note, you need parallel construction for the verbs in your bullet points. Sometimes you start with a gerund. Sometimes you start with the simple past tense. Sometimes you include a subject, and other times you don't. The convention in resumes is to have the simple past tense with no subject. Notable skills (maybe Proficient in instead?) are great, but you can leave off the interests.

[ve4cib]

Something you may consider when describing your "notable skills" or "proficiencies" is to categorize the level of knowledge and experience you have with them. When I was in university writing resumes for co-op/internship positions the co-op director suggested doing that, and from an employer perspective it does help. (It also helps you by helping you avoid awkward interview situations when they start asking you in-depth questions on a topic you've only had cursory familiarization with.)

For my university resumes I basically broke skills down into three categories:

1- Basic knowledge. You've got the basic down, and can do simple tasks using this skill/programming language, but you'll be referring to the documentation frequently for anything beyond the basics.

2- Course knowledge. You've had to learn this for a course, and covered whatever the course needed. You know more than the basics, but your skills are restricted to what was covered in-class and on assignments.

3- Working knowledge. You've used this skill a lot and can be considered an "expert" of sorts. You can perform basic tasks without blinking, and advanced tasks are not a problem for you. You've most-likely used this skill in the workplace already, and have lots of (recent) experience with it.


As for the objective line, I agree with the other posters: get rid of it. The resume should be a fairly generic document you can attach to any job-application package. The cover-letter is where you mention the position you're applying for. (I meant to mention this earlier, but forgot.)

Also, as a previous poster or two mentioned, aiming for a sysadmin job when you're still in high school, and without any serious training or experience is probably aiming unreasonably high. At this stage you're probably after any experience you can get, most-likely at an entry-level position. Even then you'll probably be in direct competition with university students and undergraduates who will have more experience and training than you.

Because of your lack of experience you really need to play-up your so-called "soft skills" -- communication, leadership, organization, and suchlike. Cite specific instances where you demonstrated these skills. Mention those on both the cover-letter and the resume.

Ultimately you should ask yourself: "Why should someone hire me? What do I have that the other applicants don't?" Write your resume and subsequent cover letters with the answers to those questions in mind, and make sure that anyone who reads your applications can determine the answers to those questions quickly and easily.


____________

EDIT:

Here are some guidelines for writing resumes and cover letters from the computer science co-op program at my university. Not all of it is applicable to you, but some of the points will be.

- Resume guidelines (http://coop.cs.umanitoba.ca/index.aspx?sec=703&too=30&eve=1&pid=57)
- Cover letter guidelines (http://coop.cs.umanitoba.ca/index.aspx?sec=703&too=30&eve=1&pid=59)
- Cover letter do's and don'ts (http://coop.cs.umanitoba.ca/index.aspx?sec=703&too=30&eve=3&pid=4667&_wor=1)